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Former skeptic Jeremy Evans comfortably presumed his atheism was true until a sobering event caused him to ask life’s biggest questions. Dream Center Non-Profit: www.dreamcenterevansville.org Unbelievable Podcast Link Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has been an atheist and also been a Christian. Through listening to their story, we listen to both perspectives, from someone who has thought and lived on the other side. At different points in our lives, we all ask the big questions. Who am I? What am I doing with my life? What am I pursuing or not? What’s wrong with me? What, if anything, can make my life better? Where am I looking for answers? Am I looking in all the wrong places? Or am I on the right path? How can I know which way to go? Who’s telling the truth? Who can I trust? We ask the questions, but that doesn’t mean we really are looking for answers, but sometimes different circumstances force our hand and cause us to take a closer look. They prompt us to stop and ask the big questions, to actually search for answers. Suddenly, all the temporary noise and busyness and distractions are removed. We look more closely at ourselves and our lives to not only ask probing questions of ourselves, whether we’ve been pursuing the right path, but also to find answers in order to make sense of our lives. Life interruptions can also make us wonder whether or not there is a God. Is God the key that can help us answer our big questions? Is He real? Can He be found? Does He have anything to say that can help us make sense of our lives? Our podcast guest today, Jeremy Evans, had a devastating circumstance that caused him to take a closer look at his own life to see if atheism held the answers he needed or whether he should look for something else, something different, something more. Come along with me to listen to his story. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jeremy. It’s wonderful to have you with us today! Good morning. Thank you for having me. As we’re getting started, Jeremy, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? Yeah. So I am from Pekin, Illinois, which is a little town outside of Peoria, and currently reside in Evansville, Indiana, with my wife and three kids. My kids are nine, seven, and six, and I work for a Christian nonprofit organization here in Evansville that does neighborhood revitalization and work with kids and families to try to connect them to God’s will for their life and help them be successful and self sufficient. Sounds wonderful. I’d love to hear more about that, perhaps later as we’re talking about what you’re doing now. But let’s get started back at the beginning of your story, because I know that you weren’t always interested in Christian ministry, for sure. You were a long way from that. So I know that you were a former atheist, and I want to know how that really birthed in you, what your beginnings were, how you grew up with your family, and their view of God and how that informed you. Yeah, so I’m the eldest of three sons in my family, and I remember at an early age not going to church, and I remember my dad’s father, my grandfather, taking me to church at a very young age separate from the rest of my family. And I remember it was the kind of church experience where they would give the kids something to doodle on, and then eventually, they would bring the kids up to the front, and the pastor would talk just to the kids for a little while, and then they’d send the kids off to Sunday School. And I remember kind of being a ham, which is kind of how I grew up. Then the next real experience I remember of church was a Baptist church in our hometown in Pekin that we got involved with primarily because of sports. So I remember my brothers playing in basketball tournaments. I remember—it’s a funny story. My dad actually coached me and my brothers in baseball growing up, and I remember the only time my dad got thrown out of a baseball game was actually by the pastor of that church. He was the umpire, and he threw my dad out, and I remember thinking, “That’s a substantial moment, when your pastor throws you out of a baseball game.” Yes, yes. But I would say, in childhood, only real experience of church was connected to sports. And then I grew up, was in high school and then college. And in college it was a really interesting mix because I attended a Christian music festival called Cornerstone in Illinois, and I had friends who were connected to faith, and I remember that vividly, but then kind of moved away from those friend circles and ended up in a circle of people who I wouldn’t say were hostile to faith but just really didn’t care. It just really wasn’t a significant part of that group of friends’ lives. And so I remember being sort of swayed, not necessarily in the direction of atheism, but just kind of away from things of faith through that time in my life. Jeremy, as you were growing up, all the way through high school, because a lot of people, especially through their teenage years, start to question what is church? Or who is God? And what is all of this? Did you have any belief in God? I mean, you were going to church-related activities, but was there anything personal about God to you at all? Or was it just kind of in the periphery of what you were doing in sports? Yeah. So I would certainly say nothing like what I have now. Nothing even close. My parents, for better or worse, just didn’t. We just didn’t go there. We just didn’t talk about faith-related things. We didn’t get the opportunity to deal with big picture questions about life and death. But there was never any kind of—the Bible wasn’t part of our lives growing up. It just wasn’t a significant influence, if that makes sense, and so no, there was no personal connection to it at all. It was very much something that was just in the periphery, and I never really had an experience that I could draw on in my childhood and say that it was sort of a formative spiritual experience. Although you did have some Christian friends. Would you say that those Christian friends took their faith seriously? I think it was more of a social structure than anything else. Heavy focus on music, and I had several friends who were in Christian bands and walking through that particular cultural landscape. I would say it was more of a social focus than anything. It was more of a, “Let’s get together. Let’s hang out. And this is kind of a unifying bond between us.” But I don’t remember any significant Bible studies. I don’t remember any significant, again, formative experiences that drew all that together. It was more just something to do. So it was really more of a nonissue in your life, it seems, until you got to college, and then you started kind of leaving whatever that social construct was, Christianity or God, and started becoming acquainted with perhaps some other ways of thinking. That’s what you do at university, right? You meet new people, you encounter new ideas, and tell me about that time in your life. Yeah. So I would, unfortunately, given the current cultural landscape, I would draw some of this almost back to politics. I remember sort of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case as having really impacted me towards a more liberal way of thinking and a more liberal way of processing the world. And I really tied those sort of political ideas to my personal beliefs about the world, and so I started to explore what more liberal voices were saying, and I’ll go back to, again, got married during this process, and the individual—my first wife, so we’re now divorced. But my first wife had no real connection to religion in her life, her family. No real connection to religion in our family. And so that was a formative experience in terms of getting married to that person and almost affirming that idea, that you can live sort of independent from these things. And as I continued to explore those more liberal ideas, I sort of found myself drawn to the idea that Christians could be sort of lazy in terms of their intellectual thinking and processing, and I was heavily turned off by the idea that a Christian would say that something was a mystery or that God was mysterious. It felt very much like a cop-out to me. And so I started reading Dawkins, started reading Harris. Letter to a Christian Nation was an important book for me during that time, and I would say it was more accidental than anything but eventually started to call myself an atheist. Accidentally. Yeah. It’s funny because the end of the story kind of goes the same way for me. I wasn’t part of Facebook groups. I wasn’t out bragging about it or trying to convert people or anything. It was more just that, on analysis and on reviewing the available information, I had sold myself that bill of goods and said, “This is how it’s going to be.” And so I think almost because faith was not an important factor, it almost felt like atheism was just as not an important factor in my life. Because the whole idea of faith was just so foreign. So as you were embracing somewhat I guess intellectually but perhaps not in a truly embodied way this atheism that you had intellectually assented to, obviously there are some very strong ideas in those books in terms of what God is, what religious faith is. Were you being informed about God and Christianity in those negative terms? Was that something that became a part of your way of thinking and vocabulary about faith? Or was it just kind of a nonissue? You didn’t really care one way or another about faith and religion. No. I think, because of the political component of it, I became really convinced that I could justify my beliefs about faith based on Christian misbehavior, as it were. So when I saw Christians doing and saying hypocritical things, when I saw Christians—it felt like at the time, and we know this to be true, that you don’t have to go very far without seeing a Christian leader sort of fail or fall or struggle with their own personal demons and individual issues, and I let all of those things sort of justify my belief. I kind of let the people do the talking as it related to whether I thought Christianity was something worth exploring, rather than letting the Gospel do the talking. So that was sort of a slippery slope, and I would say, if you set aside the Gospel and set aside what the Bible says and just base your belief about Christianity on just what you see coming out of the lives of Christians, unfortunately, I think you can justify pretty much any worldview that you really want to, based on what you see Christians doing. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. It does. I mean, like you say, you can look at any worldview and look at the warts and all, as you would see them, and then justify yourself or your own worldview. That would be an easy thing to do because we’re all fallen people, right? Yeah. Ideas aren’t pure, in a sense, but like you say sometimes it’s easy to look at the people who call themselves Christians and accuse God, rather than, like you say, looking at the Gospel or the Bible. So in your mind, I guess, Christianity and religion itself was really nothing but a social construct, as you mentioned earlier. So it wasn’t really much worth thinking about at that time. So, as you’re moving along and you’re seeing that atheism… You’ve kind of taken on that identity. You put on that hat. How was that working for you in a sense? I know you read Harris and Dawkins, but did you really look into the grounding for atheistic ideas or the implications of where those ideas go? No. And it’s funny, because when I was reading those, what I recognize as like the American pop cultural atheism books, I was feeding myself a line that, “Well, I’m going to be more intellectual than Christians, and I’m actually going to seek out the answers for myself, and I’m going to actually do the work intellectually to figure out the answers to these questions, and the reality was that I was just sort of taking a very surface level dive into those issues, finding what justified me, and then moving on down the road. And so I recognize that now, but at the time—and probably largely because it just wasn’t a very important part of my life, as I said. It wasn’t something that factored in in a deep way, and so I didn’t feel a need or a connection to try to study that in a deep way. The other thing I would say is that, again sort of driven by social constructions, I had surrounded myself at that point in my life with people who had similar beliefs and thought processes to what we’re describing here, and so it was very easy to justify sort of just going about my business, and I was never really challenged by the people around me to think about things any differently. Yeah. It is easy to do, isn’t it? Unfortunately. And that exists in the world today. We tend to surround ourselves with that echo chamber of people who we know are going to speak and think and feel the same way we speak and think and feel because that helps justify us, right? It helps us feel good about how we feel. And even today I struggle with that. Yeah. I think we’re all tempted towards that. So what was it, then, that perhaps breached your life or caused you to stop and think a little bit more closely about your atheistic identity or worldview and perhaps become open to another perspective? Yeah. So Andy Stanley says that you can—this is a terrible paraphrase—but you can do the intellectual thing with someone who’s not a Christian until you’re blue in the face, but the reality is that it takes more than an intellectual approach to get somebody over the line of faith. It almost takes some sort of emotional catalyst to get them thinking differently about their life and about the world around them, and that was certainly true for me. My wife at the time left me and was unfaithful, and that was sort of a shock to the system, right? That was sort of a seminal moment for me personally because I just was lost. I was completely shocked by that, completely blown away, and really didn’t know what to do. And it really turned my whole life upside down in a good way, looking back now. At the time, it didn’t feel like a good way, but it got me really thinking about everything in my life and about whether I was making good choices and whether I was spending time with the right people and those sorts of things. I can’t imagine what that would feel like. I know that your life probably was turned upside down, inside out, and it caused you to really, I guess, stop and reconsider your life choices, your life perspectives, and really look more at yourself, I presume? Did that lead you towards thinking, “Well, maybe there’s more to life. Maybe there’s a God who exists. Maybe there’s a better way to make sense of my life.” Was it causing you to ask those kinds of questions? Yeah. It was everything. I try to think about life then, and it’s just really difficult to put in perspective, even, because it was just so wildly different, but really I think there was this foundation underneath me that I had built my life upon that these things are true, these things are not true, and this is how we’re going to live. And it really all got blown up by this experience, and so I really had to step back and sort of live on my own, or live with my own perspective, rather than sort of cheating and taking some of those things for granted, if that makes sense. So it was this, I guess, time in the wilderness, as it were. When your life is, like you say, kind of blown up and you’re in this new place and you’re trying to figure things out. Did it cause you to just want to meet new or different people or reconsider or atheism? Did you see a problem with the way that you were living or thinking? Or that caused you to reconsider your life choices? Perhaps you wanted to go a different direction. What brought you towards reconsidering God? Well, certainly I would have to say that my wife was an important part of that conversation, so if it’s okay, let me kind of transition and talk a little bit about it. Absolutely. So my wife, Tara, I met her shortly after my divorce, and she was a really interesting person to me. She was a follower of Jesus and was very straightforward with me about that. But Tara was sort of uncanny to me. That seems like a weird word, but it’s really the only one I can think of. Because she challenged all my assumptions. She was willing to invest in me relationally regardless of my status, regardless of whether she felt like she was going to win me over or not. And that was new to me in terms of communicating and interacting with Christians because in my past history it always kind of felt like, with Christians, it was about putting one on the scoreboard, you know? But this woman was not about that. She was about knowing me and understanding who I was and coming to understand what I believed, and I remember, on our first date, I was very straightforward with her and told her what I thought, and she was sort of open to discussing that and was sort of respectful to that, which was all totally disarming and off putting, like I remember thinking, “Who is this lady? She’s not following any of the rules. And that’s a good thing.” It was almost that—I think of it from the inside now, but it was almost that sweetness that we hear about and talk about when we think about the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit works on us and that sort of uncanny way that He has of convicting and not condemning and of helping lead us to the truth when it seems like nobody else can. And so I know that God used Tara in all of this and in these challenging moments in my life to draw me closer to Him and to, ironically, put one on the scoreboard and, [because without Tara, I don’t know that I ever would have come to these conclusions on my own, if that makes sense. Yes, yes. So she countered all the negative stereotypes you had of Christians, it sounds like. Yes. That’s right! That’s right. And brought plausibility, perhaps, and an attraction towards Christianity that was, it sounds like, very unexpected. Yeah. So this is going to sound like a crazy thing to cite as a positive, but she just didn’t want to argue about it. She was open with me about her faith and introduced me to her friends, and I got to become part of her community of people, but it was not a… “And the reason why we’re doing that is because we want to get you from here to here.” It was just a genuineness. It was a kindness and sort of a willingness to invest that I personally had never experienced from Christians before, at least that I could say that I was sure of basically, or that I knew of. And that was sweet. It was exactly what I needed to feel safe and to feel the opportunity to start to explore. And she was absolutely instrumental. But through this process with Tara, I got introduced to her friend, Bob. They weren’t pouncing on you, as it were, to try to make you a Christian. They actually gave you room and space and accepted you as who you were and gave you an opportunity to be with them and observe their, I presume, genuine Christianity. It sounds like they weren’t necessarily trying to give you apologetic arguments or trying to convince you. They were giving you an example of embodied Christianity, that sweetness. They invested in you. They were generous toward you. They wanted to know who you were. I’m sure that would have been quite surprising. It sounds like you were intrigued by who they were as people, that that goodness kind of opened the door towards a more intellectual searching. Is that how you found it? Absolutely yes. I mean I think their genuineness and their kindness was what helped me. I feel, as Christians, when we talk about these sorts of things, we kind of take them for granted sometimes, but I know that one of the things that we say as Christians is that we want people around us to notice that there’s something different about us, right? And I guess let this story be the proof in the pudding, that that does actually happen. And that that does actually make a difference. Because I noticed that there was something different about these people who I was being placed around. And it was attractive. It was something that I wanted to have, started to explore more. Good, good. So it gave you, in a sense, a possibility of a life well lived and so that you were willing to look behind the curtain, as it were, for the grounding for this life. So you were talking about someone named Bob. So I’m wondering who that is and if he provides a little bit of the next step towards an intellectual understanding of the grounding and truth of the Christian worldview. Yeah, so Bob is a good friend of Tara’s and mine still today. He is an apologist, I think is a good way to describe him. He’s one of those guys that you’ve just got to know him to understand just how unique he really is. And was good friends with Tara at the time that we started to interact and so was very intrigued by our relationship and also by the fact that I kind of called myself an atheist. And he wanted to know more about that. And so we had the opportunity to interact on a number of occasions, and Bob was willing to walk through anything. He was willing to explore and deal with and try to respond to pretty much anything that I had to say, and that, of course, was a big deal for me. He really walked me through the historicity of the gospels. And so we talked about the stories about Jesus that didn’t make any sense that they were written. The ideas that there were people who had nothing to gain who were telling these same stories and who were consistent in the way they were telling these stories. And that really was deeply challenging to me and my worldview at the time. I can’t even articulate it. And he very gently and slowly walked me through those things, would talk them through, and would provide input and guidance and all that sort of thing and was just instrumental, and again, sort of like to your point about allowing the space for those conversations to happen and for those things to be learned. And really, I would say too, to his credit, challenged me on this idea that I was going to be all intellectual in a world where I had not really adequately explored the alternative. And so I remember it very vividly. He and Tara and I were sitting in a bookstore, and he was asking me why I wasn’t stepping across the line of faith, and I said, “Well, I’m not sure yet. I just don’t know,” and he asked me a series of questions, and I answered that I felt like all those things were true, and at the end of the conversation, he said, “Well, you know what Jeremy, if I had a cross around my neck I’d give it to you. You’re a Christian,” and he got up and walked away. It was this movie moment where it’s like, “Wow! Okay. Now what do I do?” And it was just fascinating that he was willing to invest the way that he did and sort of walk me across the line of faith in the way that he did. It was definitely a life changing moment. Wow! So just to be clear. So there was historical evidence that made it sound as if there was a solid historicity to these stories about Jesus, that there was adequate evidence that the reliability of the text was solid and that perhaps the stories were worth believing. There is a sense in which you can believe the intellectual grounding, as it were, for the text itself, and that perhaps the stories did happen, but that’s a very different thing than… You know, as Christians, we’ll say, “accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior.” That’s a very different kind of thing that involves a life commitment. It involves your heart, your willingness to give your life, as it were, to this person called Jesus. So it sounds as if almost like he rushed you to the finish line, like the Christians you had talked about before who were trying to get a notch in their belt. Did it feel that way? It sounds almost as if you had to catch your breath and then think, “Okay, what just happened here? Did I become a Christian? Was that my decision or his?” That what it kind of sounds like. So it was definitely that moment, and I will tell you, to kind of encapsulate it in a way that made sense to me at the time, he challenged me to put all the rest of it aside, right? So I remember having a lot of friends who were gay, still do to this day, and thinking the way Christians treat homosexuals isn’t fair. And I remember having all those same political thoughts that I did when I was an atheist and thinking, “I hate the way that Christians interact with all this,” and I remember Bob saying, “Yeah, I understand all that, and that’s completely fair, and we’ve earned our reputation on some of those things, but just for a moment, just put all that aside and talk to me about Jesus. And let’s answer these questions about whether Jesus was born of a virgin, died and was resurrected, claimed to be God incarnate, and died for my sins, and so yeah, I get all that stuff. Peace to all that. That’s all relevant. That’s all valid. Those are important questions that you need to answer, but don’t you feel like you owe it to yourself to answer them from the inside if you believe these other things are true. And that was the defining moment in all of it for me, was to think of all this through that lens, if that makes sense. And that’s what got me out of the concern that this was all a sales pitch, right? It was because, in my own mind, I was internalizing it and figuring it out for myself, whereas, given the perspective going forward, I know now that it was God doing all that work. And so that was the difference. That’s what made the difference for me, was setting all the rest of it aside and just answering these questions about Jesus. So Jesus was true, like true incarnate, and you were convinced that the resurrection was valid and that His claims to Godhood were valid based upon His resurrection and all of that. So you were convinced that that was true intellectually but, His death had some application to you personally, that He saved you. I mean that’s what the Gospel is, right? That He came, and it’s not just a set of intellectual or historical events that you believe happened in the past but somehow, like you were saying, it supernaturally applied to you. Is that what you’re trying to say? That it really became very personal for you and you understood that and you understood what you were saying when you said, “Yes, it’s true,” but it’s also personally—it’s internally true. So it was interesting, Jana. I would say that was almost the afterthought, right? Like the process of thinking it through, and I recognize the sort of silliness of all this now down the road, and so forgive me, but in my mind, the process of thinking it through for myself and coming to these conclusions for myself and having all these answers that I went and got, that somehow sort of freed me in this to be able to believe these things. That was what I was telling myself at the time. And that was challenging, without a doubt. But it was an important part of it for me. Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely. So that was kind of the pivotal turning point for you, in which you took off your atheist hat and you took on an identity as a Christian. So tell me about your world after that. Did that worldview become more grounded as you went on? Or just experientially, intellectually, in every way? How did that work for you? How did it change your life? How did you find yourself pursuing Christianity in a way that you hadn’t before? Yeah. So interestingly, in accepting Jesus and accepting the truth of Jesus, none of those other problems that I had went away. Or just sort of disappeared on their own obviously. Those were all still things that I wanted to be able to process through and figure out, and to this day, I’m still dealing with some of those things. It became more natural at that point to think about… So going back to the idea of it being related to social structures, it became very natural at that point to think of all this in the context of it as a social structure, so I started to attend church regularly, got involved in volunteering at church, started to participate in small groups and thinking about my life that way, but also started to study more and try to learn more, so the way I met you, Jana, I think was through the Unbelievable podcast, and so shout out to our friends with Unbelievable. They were a really important force for me when I first started exploring this and when I came across a line of faith I wanted to learn more about what the answers to some of these questions were, listening to Unbelievable made a huge difference for me. Because it helped me answer a lot of questions, and it gave me a resource to go to, and I felt like, to the point about it being an intellectual process, I felt like they really paid homage to the debate and to the ability to go back and forth between different voices and hear different voices. You know, we just don’t have that in American culture today. And so shout out to Justin at Unbelievable because he made a big difference in my life as I started to try to learn more about what all this meant. Yeah. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Unbelievable podcast by Justin Brierley, it’s typically a conversation between an atheist and a Christian, where they’re discussing issues of culture, of philosophy, of apologetics, of all kinds of things, but done, like you say, in a very diplomatic way. Usually. Usually. There’s no better moderator than Justin Brierley. So I presume that, like you say, as you were becoming more of an embodied Christian like your wife, Tara, and that group, that you were learning to see your life and see the answers to questions that you had about your life in a very different way, because, as you know, the way that you believe affects the way that you feel and the way that you live. Your worldview kind of trickles down to your world, as it were. So moving from atheism to Christianity is a tremendous transformation in the way that you look at the world. So just the work that you do tells me that you’ve made a fairly substantial transformation in the way you think, the way you live, and the way that you move in your life. Can you talk about that? Yeah. Boy. So one thing I want to mention is that initial process led to a lot of questioning from non-believing friends, who really didn’t understand. A lot of non-believing friends who felt like this decision I had made was sort of a smack in the face of their worldview and their lifestyle. And lost some friendships. Had some relationships go sour over it. And look back on that and hope to have opportunities to reconnect with those people eventually, but I have worked in the nonprofit world my whole life, and coming across the line of faith to Christianity really fit in the context of everything I believed about the way the world ought to be through my experience with working in nonprofits. So that was very natural, I would say, and sort of made a lot of sense. Ended up in this role that I’m in now, where I’m actually able to live out my faith authentically every day. I’m surrounded by people who sort of believe the same things I believe but want to use that belief to make a difference in the world and want to use the things that we believe to bring the kingdom here on earth. And so that’s a big change for me and a big deal, and it’s all been sort of self-affirming, like it’s been this cycle that has helped me to grow. In the meantime, I’ve got my own kids now, and we have been able to address and talk about issues of faith with our kids, and I think back on my childhood and about kind of what I missed and what I lost by not having faith in my life, and one thing I know I’m sure of is that my kids won’t have that experience, that as best I can, as long as I have a voice in it, they’ll be able to benefit from the experience of faith in Jesus throughout their lives. So it’s been quite a transformation, and living now and working now in this field where I’m able to live it out every day is just a dream come true. It’s everything I could have hoped for. Wow! That’s really wonderful. I’m going to play skeptic here for just a moment. Bring it on. I can imagine some people are listening and saying, “Oh, you had a bad thing happen in your life. You met a nice girl. You had some emotional needs. You’d just come off a divorce. You had a desire for social belonging and that kind of thing. How do you know that Christianity is true? You just moved from one social set to another. How do you know that Christianity is real and true, that God exists, and that Christianity is worth believing?” Yeah. That’s a really good question. I think that you can easily look at things like that, and I think this is hard for a nonbeliever to hear, and I don’t know exactly how to process it, and so they’ll have to forgive me if they hear me say this, but the realization that it had nothing to do with me, that it wasn’t me coming across the line, that it wasn’t me deciding that these were the right answers, but that it was everything to do with what God was doing in me, is the thing that has catalyzed my faith and my growth in faith in Christ ever since that day. And so that day that I came across the line of faith, I wouldn’t have told you that I thought that was true, but I recognize now that it’s not something I did, and it’s not something we do that helps make the world work. I would also say one of the things that I would always—and I mentioned it earlier—but one of the things I would always come back to Christians with was, “Well, you just answer everything with, ‘It’s mysterious,’ and just a cop-out answer. You’re just going to tell me, ‘God’s a mystery, and we just don’t know.'” And there are very real issues in our world that can lead us into a place of questioning God. And COVID is certainly a very good example of that this year, and there have been times in my private prayer life where I’ve come to God and said, “You know what? I don’t like this, and I don’t understand what you’re doing, and I hope you’ll help me understand.” But at the end of the day, what I’ve landed on there, sort of my finish line on that idea, that Christians seem hypocritical when they talk about things being mysterious, is that, if God created a world that Jeremy could understand all the ins and outs of, it’s just not that impressive. If the all-powerful Creator of the universe built it in such a way that we could figure out, big deal. There better be some things that we don’t understand. There had better be some things that our limited brains can’t comprehend because otherwise it’s just a movie that we wrote, right? It’s just a story that we can write ourselves, and that’s just not all that impressive. And so to those who would question and to those who are skeptical, I would say I’ve been there and I understand that perspective, and I would say keep trying to learn and keep trying to grow, and then to Christians, I would definitely want to say build relationships. And build unconditional relationships with people. Friendships where you’re going to love them no matter what, and you’re going to show them the love of Christ no matter what. Because it’s that diligence and determination that ultimately is going to surprise people and cause people to say, “Wow! This person seems different.” The fact that she was not—I’ve got a picture of her sitting next to my computer here, and I keep looking over at her. The fact that Tara was willing to commit to being in a relationship with me—and maybe it wouldn’t have been a longer-term relationship. Maybe it just would have been a friendship if things had gone differently, but the fact that she was willing to love me and be in relationship with me regardless of the outcome made all the difference in the world, and so I would say to Christians, “Go find somebody that doesn’t believe what you do and try to talk them into it. Try to bring them across the line of faith. Try to relate them into it, and be kind to them and show them the love of Christ and show them what Christ has done for us.” Because ultimately I think that’s one of the best ways that we have to attract people to God. Yeah, that’s certainly how God attracts us to Himself is through His great kindness, isn’t it? Yeah. It leads us to see ourselves in a way that we need Him. So wow, this has been really, really wonderful, Jeremy. You have walked us through your story. It’s been a really great story because I think it incorporates so many things that help us see that conversion is not just an intellectual idea. It’s a really fully orbed life [confusion?], that there’s so much involved and that we as Christians have an opportunity just by embodying our Christianity with grace and goodness and love, that we can open the door towards people. I loved the word you used. You said safe. That we can create a place of safety for people to explore it without feeling like we are trying to pounce on someone to convince them that our way is the best way. So you have so much wisdom, I think, coming from both perspectives. And I think we have a lot to learn from your experience as an atheist, as well as a Christian, so thank you for being with us today. Well, thank you so much, Jana. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jeremy’s story. You can find out more about his nonprofit by visiting his website in the episode notes, as well as find a link to the Unbelievable podcast as well. If you enjoyed it, 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 be listening to the other side.  

Former skeptic Rachel embraced atheism until her intellectual curiosity regarding God’s existence led her to Jesus. Learn more about Rachel and her book at www.rachelgilson.com Recommended Resources: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin Reason for God by Tim Keller Episode Transcript Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Rachel. It’s so great to have you with me today. It’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me, and tell the listeners, a little bit about yourself before we get into your story? Yeah. Well, I’m a California sojourner in New England. I currently work for Cru, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ, on the national theological development and culture team. I write a little bit. I speak a little bit. I parent a 7-year-old a little bit, so that’s a little bit of where I am right now in life. And you’re pursuing a PhD at the moment as well? Yes. I’m working on my PhD in public theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Okay. Wonderful, wonderful. Well, maybe we’ll hear a little bit more about those bits and pieces as we go. As we’re starting with your story, as you know, this podcast is talking with former atheists who found their way from atheism to Christianity, and sometimes that’s quite a long journey, from one ideology to the other and one life to another, but it all starts somewhere, and I’d like to start with your childhood and your culture, your family, your community, just kind of how you grew up. Shape that for us. Tell us how your journey or your story started. Was God in that story at all as a child? Yeah. I love context. I was a history major in college, so these are my favorite. Yes, context means a lot. Context is a big one. Yeah. So the bigger context is my mother had grown up in a practicing Catholic household but not really serious. She ditched it at a young age, so by the time she was raising me, nothing of that was in her life. She had really gone far away from Catholic doctrinal teaching, moral teaching, all of that. My dad similarly didn’t have religion in his life when he was raising me. He had grown up not church going at all, like poor in the hills of Appalachia. He had met some Jesus people along the way, he says, but there was just no faith in his life, even as a young boy, so by the time my parents were bringing up my brother and I, we were just never in the church, not even Christmas or Easter. It just wasn’t a thing that was talked about. It wasn’t a part of our fabric. Now, the community I grew up in is north of Santa Barbara, California, and sometimes people here California and think really, really liberal, and obviously that’s true, but actually where I grew up was very rural, in a lot of ways conservative. My high school had a working farm on it and a place where you could tie up your horse, like that kind of rural. The town it was in literally had one stop light. And so I knew that a lot of people around me were churchgoers, but as a child, I didn’t really know what that meant. It was just sort of a fact in people’s lives, and I never really thought about it as a kid. So there was no childhood belief in God, no prayer, I mean- Nothing. … there was nothing in there to give you a context for that kind of belief at all. No. I did have some babysitters when I was a young girl who were Mormons, and I have a distinct memory of… they had a picture on their wall, you know, of that feather-haired 1970s white Jesus who’s staring softly into the middle distance? Yes, yes. And I remember sort of making fun of that picture and getting a timeout for making fun of Jesus. So that was my first real encounter with Jesus as a concept. Wow. All right. So that was your childhood, and so, as you were getting older and going to school, still no cultural or contextual references, even for Christmas or things like that? Well, Christmas I loved, but it was definitely that weird porridge of Santa and Rudolph and Baby Jesus and Frosty the Snowman. It’s a little unclear what Baby Jesus had to do with any of it. Right! It was just the full-on tree, presents, commercialism type of thing. And Easter, like I got an Easter basket, but to me, Easter was entirely a rabbit who laid eggs or a rabbit who carried eggs. It’s entirely unclear what exactly is going on there. Chocolate is heavily involved. The resurrection? Not even mentioned. So no religious references at all to those holidays? No, no. Okay. Take us forward a little bit. So you’re growing up in elementary school, and you know, middle school is a time where you start really looking around, questioning, and I imagine you would be a thoughtful, introspective kind of person, or you read that way. Why don’t you tell us about who you were and if you were asking big questions or thinking about those things. I have a distinct memory of being in, like, the fourth grade and sitting up on top of a play structure, kind of looking down on the playground during a recess, and trying to work out whether fate existed or not. Like, “Are my actions all determined beforehand? And if so, does that limit my freedom? Or do I actually have real freedom?” Looking back on that, I think, “Well, that’s sort of a weird thing to be thinking about on the playground as a 9-year-old, but I do know that I’ve always been interested in big ideas. Actually, the summer after my eighth grade year, my grandfather, my mom’s dad, so a very not-practicing Catholic, gave me a bunch of books to read to earn money, and I was really into this. And one of the books was—I think it was popular in the 1950s. It was called The Robe. It was a historical fiction about one of the centurions who was at the crucifixion of Jesus, and so I read this book just because Grandpa assigned it. I remember reading it and thinking, “This is a really interesting story,” and at that point, right on the hinge towards high school, I did start asking a couple of my friends who I knew were churchgoers vaguely religious questions. I don’t remember now what they were, but I was sort of like, “Oh, well they must know some sort of things about this,” and I remember the answers I got just being utterly disappointing, shallow, like not really knowing what I was talking about, and so fairly quickly, I had an association of, like, “Well, maybe Christians aren’t people who think for themselves? Maybe they aren’t people who know what they’re talking about. Maybe it’s just a thing that’s sort of a crutch when you need something happy.” But at that point, my freshman year in high school, I wasn’t necessarily thinking of that in a cruel way or a dismissive way, but it was just where my interviews led me. And I remember even being invited to… The Presbyterian church had a youth group on one of the weeknights, and there was pizza and basketball, and so I would go because that’s where other kids were, but I remember often sitting in the back of the room during presentation time, thinking, “I don’t understand why you need Jesus and God,” so there was a little bit of exposure, but my early exposures really only hardened me against it. I could put it that way. It seemed rather nonsensical, and there was no one there to provide any kind of substantive answer or explanation for what it was or anything like that. So you lost respect for it, essentially. Yeah. I did lose respect for it, and over time in high school, I also lost respect for the Christians my age, so on the one hand, I started to think more and more, “I think the big ideas deserve real answers, and I’m not seeing those in Christianity.” The other thing that I was discovering about myself in high school, which was interesting that’s based on a cultural change we’ve had, but I realized, “Gosh, the way that my peers feel about other young men really is how I feel about other young women.” This was in 2001 when I first realized this and started having romantic and sexual relationships with other young women. This is right before Texas struck down its sodomy law in 2003, right before Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, so it was just a weird little hinge period as we were moving, but I was also like, “Well, I’m pretty sure that Christians hate gay people, and I want to marry a woman someday, so not only is this intellectually dis-respectable,” is that the way to put it? Intellectually silly. “But it’s hateful for no reason,” and I saw the kids who identified as Christians also at some of the parties that I went to, doing some of the same stupid [UNKNOWN 9:21] things as me. I was like, “Well, at the end of the day, what really is this? It seems to be nothing.” So it was a combination of a lot of things, it sounds like, that really pushed you away from Christianity. It wasn’t intellectually respectable, morally respectable, I presume- Right. … and also those who believed were hypocritical. And what was it pushing you towards? That’s a great question. I really wanted to know what was true. It’s sort of cliché, I guess, but sort of like the true, the good, and the beautiful. I wanted to know what those things were. I took a lot of cues from culture. The kind of things that you read and watch and listen to. There were two high school teachers I had who both identified as atheists, which was kind of cool in my little small cow town, and they were warm, nurturing, wonderful people. And people who took interest in me, who invested in me, who listened to me. I really adored both of them. And so I think that having those type of role models who were so appealing also really helped me think about the fact that a humanistic life, an atheistic life, could be a life of virtue and goodness and of true living. And obviously you respected them. They invested in you. Did they provide, did you think, the answers? Those intellectual answers that you thought were true with regard to atheism? Were you reading? I don’t think they were interested in providing me any types of answers. I think they were interested in just providing me a scaffolding for how to become a thinking person. Which I think is ultimately probably why I respected them. I wasn’t necessarily even asking them the questions. I was looking to them as models for a way to live. So it was during high school, I presume, that you took their role model and you embraced it as your own. Yeah, absolutely. And you would consider yourself an atheist in high school? Oh, definitely. By the time I was a senior in high school, my senior year English teacher, who was one of these teachers, I started affectionately turning in my English papers to her with, instead of my name at the top, I just wrote the word Satan. Kind of antagonistic. Condescending, perhaps? Condescending, yeah. Maybe a little contentious? Arrogant for sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was a jerk, basically. And what do you think informed that sense of condescension or arrogance towards Christians? Part of it’s a personality defect. I think I’m arrogant by disposition. And so if I don’t have any moral check on it, that’s the direction I’m going to go. I’ve heard my whole life that I’m very funny, and one of the things I can absolutely do quickly is decide to use that against people. And the obvious targets in my context were sort of this picture I had of dumb Christians. People who weren’t thinking. That kind of thing. So you embraced the identity of not only same-sex attraction but also atheist. Yeah. Definitely. And so that identity moved you into college? Yeah. So tell me about that. And I was really excited. Again, I grew up in sort of an unimpressive place, but I got into Yale, which was really exciting for me. I thought, “Finally, I’m going to be at a place where I can explore big ideas with like-minded people. Finally, I’m going to be in a place where I can give some elbow room to my sexuality a little more.” I had never actually faced any persecution or anything like that related to my same-sex relationships, but it just—it wasn’t a lot. There wasn’t a big market exactly. I was just like, “I want to get to the broader world.” So I was excited. I showed up in New Haven kind of ready and raring to go, for sure. And what did you find there? Did you find those people who were willing to explore those big ideas? Did you find like-minded atheists? I found everybody who was smarter than me. I imagine there are a lot of smart people at Yale. Everyone who had received better training or was just naturally kind of further ahead than I was. But I did. I found people who were interesting and exciting and wanted to talk about this stuff and also just wanted to have fun. You get assigned in groups each to your freshman counselor, and they make you go to all these meetings at the beginning of the year, so you can talk about things, and we all just liked to complain about it, really. But I remember being in one of these freshman counselor meetings very early in my freshman year, and my counselor was leading us through a conversation. He must have asked something like, “What’s your experience here been like so far?” I’m not exactly sure what the question he asked was, but there was a classmate of mine, a young man, who responded, “You know, I get the sense that a lot of people think that faith or religion is only for stupid people, and I don’t think that’s true at all.” He was clearly speaking from some sort of faith perspective, and he offered that up, and my first response was like, “Yeah, we’ll you’re wrong,” and my freshman counselor was like, “Yeah, can’t you believe how silly and ignorant that is?” So I remember being like, “Wait a minute. Oh, is that not a thing we’re supposed to think?” So that was a weird first little entry point into having my assumption that religion was for idiots questioned. Now, over the course of my time in Yale, I absolutely encountered anti-Christian, anti-religious, sort of condescension or bias or these types of things, so I’m not trying to say that it was a beautiful and only open and affirming type of environment for people with faith, but that moment was really important for me, and there was more toleration and more encouragement of free exchange of thoughts than I think is sometimes portrayed of campus life in places like that. So this was an intellectual place, but obviously everyone did not have the same worldview or ideology. Yeah. Because these are thinking people and were willing to explore ideas, did they really explore—those who were naturalistic or atheistic or materialistic in their understanding of the world—did they explore those, do you think, in depth? Looked at the implications of their worldview? That’s a great question. I fell in quickly with people who were similar to me, and usually, when you’re in groups of people who are similar to you, you don’t spend a lot of time talking about your presuppositions necessarily. You end up more having a lot of stupid, fun conversations, but a lot of conversations more about implications sometimes, you know? Like what does it mean to live well? I’m not sure we phrased it that way. But like who are we supposed to be? What are we supposed to choose? What are the right kinds of things? And mostly refracted through politics. Or maybe not mostly, but politics was definitely a piece of it. Kind of Democrat/Republican types of things. Or policy types of things. Sometimes ethical types of things. I was in a program for freshman. You had to apply into it. That was sort of an intensive course through the humanities of the Western world. So you did philosophy and literature and politics. So a lot of really fun conversations over the classic texts of the Western tradition. So that was fun, too. It was a little more detached from everyday life but still interesting. I remember trying to read John Locke and just, like, throwing it across the room, because I was like, “What is he even saying?” It was pressing the edges. It was what I needed. What I’d encountered in high school was actually too easy for me, and so it led me into a false confidence. I was encountering some texts and some ideas that were stretching for me and helpful for me, and it was just good. It was rich. But it was also really, really destabilizing. So on the one hand I look back on it now and I see the trajectory that I’ve been on, and I feel so thankful for the ways that I’ve grown as a thinker and my ability to approach texts and approach ideas, but in the first throes of it, ultimately I was feeling just a little bit lost. A lot of my peers had been trained already in seminar contexts, already interacting with primary sources. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and so I was flying around on instinct and my lack of training, which ultimately gave really checkered results academically. So you were becoming a critical thinker. Yeah. And perhaps your presumptions were being questioned, destabilized, whether it would be through academic study or even that one moment where your presumption was questioned as to whether or not Christianity… Was it really all that ignorant and silly? Or is there something more? So you’re moving through this process of learning and growing, as we all do when you expose yourself to other ideas and other people, right? Somehow those engagements and those interactions cause you sometimes to stop and question. Yeah. And they should. What else happened at Yale? Were you being further destabilized by ideas and people? Or were you being more affirmed in your atheism? I think I was being affirmed in my atheism but destabilized in my position as a thinker. I was just immature. I wasn’t probably as ready as I should’ve been. Which is okay. And people there were legitimately smarter than me, which is also okay. But one of the big rocks of my freshman year was the fact that my really important romantic relationship with my girlfriend at the time just exploded. And there were a lot of different reasons for that, but also it was a contributing factor to my emotional slump. Teenage breakups are hard. I resorted to plenty of drinking. I mean not like irresponsibly, not like not going to class or not doing my homework, but just sort of that’s what seemed to be the acceptable way to deal with sadness, and by the time I came back to the beginning of the spring semester, which is really the dead of winter, January, I was cold for the first time. I was heartbroken. I wasn’t sure that I belonged at this place. It was a lot of instability. I cannot underplay, too, how growing up in southern California does not prepare you to be cold for the first time. I was so miserable! I was miserable. So you were being thrown off your feet, not only with regard to your thinking a little bit but also relationally. That’s always, like you say, difficult and destabilizing. So what happened then? So what else are you supposed to do? I needed some identity, and I remember trying on, like, “Oh, should I go to the gym more? No, I’m really lazy. Should I write for the school newspaper? No. That doesn’t even interest me. I’m not smart enough.” So I just kept going to class. It’s like you put one foot in front of the other, and I happened to be in a lecture one day where they were introducing us to René Descartes, you know the old dead French guy who coined the phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” and developed from a phrase a whole proof for the existence of God. So I remember sitting in the audience, hearing the lecturer sort of explaining how Descartes was working through his thought, and I remember sitting there, thinking, “This is a really stupid proof for the existence of God,” like, “I don’t buy it.” And I still don’t buy it, really. But while I was sitting there, I did think, “What if there are other good proofs for the existence of God?” which immediately made me tense up and sort of want to push it away. Like, “No, that’s not what we think about. Faith, Christianity, that’s for stupid bigots. We don’t go there.” But at the same time I couldn’t really shake the interest that had been stirred in me. I was like, “Well, shouldn’t I know the better ones even so I could refute them?” or, “What if there’s something there?” I don’t know. I just felt like a good angel/bad angel but atheist angels? I’m not really sure exactly. Sort of pulling me. So I’m a Millennial, right? The natural thing to do when you have serious and secretive questions is to ask the internet, you know? So I would go back to my room, open my gigantic Dell laptop. You know, you needed an upper body workout thing just to lift those. And I would just type religious search terms into Google, doing that whole internet rabbit trail thing, you know? Where you don’t even know how you ended up in a certain place. You’re just following hyperlinks and reading different stuff. And I definitely did that way more than I should have. I definitely did that way more than my French homework, for example, and my grade absolutely reflected that. And that was a really interesting time I was encountering ideas. But I also sort of kept coming back to reading about Jesus, like stories about Jesus. I don’t know if I was reading the gospels or reading what talked about the gospels, but His character was becoming more interesting to me. Like, “Oh, He’s clearly quite intelligent. There’s a lot of moral dignity here. I can see why He’s an interesting person.” I felt sort of drawn to Him. I also remember reading a lot of articles, maybe not a lot but at least articles that made an impression on me on the historical reliability of the resurrection account. I guess I always assumed out of hand that that was ridiculous, and I was reading different defenses of it. I was like, “Whoa! There’s some interesting evidence here. I’m not saying I believe it, but there’s some really interesting evidence here.” So kind of dancing around mostly the person of Jesus, with some other random topics thrown in. But really quickly, with that, I was like, “Well, I want to marry a woman someday. Am I even allowed to be interested in Jesus as a character? I’m not saying I want to be a religious person, but isn’t this against everything?” The only two Christians I knew at Yale, or at least people who identified as Christians, were these two girls who were dating each other. And one of them was actually training, en route to be a Lutheran minister. I knew this because she and I were in marching band together, which is the lamest thing you could possibly admit to in some contexts, but it’s true. So I remember thinking, “Well, I should go to my friends and just ask them what they think,” like, “Clearly, they don’t think that. Otherwise, their whole lives wouldn’t be the way that it is.” So I went to them. And they were sweet, lovely girls. I was sort of like, “Well, this doesn’t make sense to me. How does it make sense to you?” They were like, “Well, it’s all been a big misunderstanding. The Bible actually supports monogamous same-sex relationships,” and I was like, “Really?” Like, “If you believe that—you’re smart people. You’re here. Maybe it’s true.” And so I remember them giving me sort of a packet of information explaining how the Bible actually affirmed monogamous same-sex relationships. And I was kind of excited. I’m like, “If this is in the Bible, that’s super interesting. That opens up some other doors.” So I remember taking it back to my room and reading through it. I love packets to deconstruct and look for evidence for and stuff like this. So I remember reading it and finding it pretty persuasive. Like, “Ooh! These are really good arguments. I could see how this makes sense. Maybe they’re really onto something. This is good!” But I also thought, “Well, I probably should actually read the text of the Bible it’s talking about. I mean, I’m not a Bible scholar, but it does seem, in general, that you should read the primary sources.” So I didn’t have a Bible, right? So I just pulled up these texts on my computer screen. I remember looking at my computer screen, down at the packet, comparing, working through, and then ultimately, it’s like, “Well, I don’t think these arguments look as good actually compared to the original text as they did just on their own.” Like, “It’s really nice that these girls want to believe that, but this just seems to have too many problems to get around.” And I remember feeling, on the one hand, sort of relieved, like I didn’t want the Bible to actually have a hold on me, but two, also sort of stupid for even having pursued it and kind of disappointed. I remember just throwing it in my cheap dorm trash can and being like, “Whatever. This isn’t even a thing that should be pursued.” And I’m pretty sure I just never talked to the girls about it again, and they were polite and didn’t harass me about it, you know? So it seems like you would be at a very interesting crossroads, looking at some things intellectually, finding them interesting. It’s pulling your interest. But yet on a personal level finding things about Christianity that may not cohere with your lifestyle. Right! With what I wanted for my future, what I assumed was going to make me happy. Yeah! But in a sense, as someone who’s a pursuer of truth, as you were, and you can’t kind of unsee what you have seen or unhear or unread or whatever what you had already started being exposed to, what did you do with that? You had a choice of moving forward to continue to explore or to disengage. Well, I was confronted with a different circumstance. I’d kind of let it go a little bit. Also, frankly, I was behind on my homework. But I remember being in the bedroom of one of my acquaintances. So she wasn’t necessarily a friend. We didn’t hang out a lot. We’d have breakfast a lot together, but we weren’t buddies, but for whatever reason, this day I went to her room. She had a bookshelf next to her doorway, and one of my favorite hobbies is looking at people’s bookshelves and judging them, right? So I was looking through her bookshelf, and I knew that she was a non-practicing Catholic. She had a copy of Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. The title of the book was really interesting, and I thought, “Oh! I want to read that book,” like, “Of course I should be reading books and not just the internet.” But I was embarrassed by my interest. I didn’t want to ask my friend to borrow the book. I didn’t want to have conversations with her. I didn’t want her to know that I was even remotely thinking about this, so I just stole the book off her shelf. She wasn’t looking. It’s a small volume. It fit right into my shoulder bag. So I just took it. Again, I didn’t also believe in any moral transcendence, so it was like, “You’re not really hurting anyone,” which stealing a book is kind of… obviously it’s her property, but anyway, “If you’re not hurting anyone and you don’t get caught, no big deal.” So it was while I was reading. I just started reading this book. I remember being roughly halfway through it one day between classes. And I remember… I don’t remember what chapter I was in. I don’t remember the paragraph, even the point that Lewis was making. But I do remember sitting there, in the middle of reading it, and suddenly being… I don’t really know how to describe it other than overwhelmed with the sure knowledge that God existed. Not like a generic store brand God but the God Who created everything, Who made me. Very much… the God who was holy. I didn’t know that vocabulary word, but that was the pressing sense. Not only does He exist, but His existence in perfection has implications. Really the front edge was just this, like, “God exists, and I am very bad.” Arrogant. I was a liar. I was sexually immoral. I made fun of people. I cheated on things. I was reading a stolen book. All of the chips were pushed into the guilty category. That was the thing that I felt. But with that—I was just talking to a friend of mine recently who’s been an atheist for a long time, and he’s like, “Tell me how you converted.” I’m like, “Dave, I don’t really know how to explain it to you.” On some level, the Lord moved. I also really understood right in that moment, when I was feeling my sin in front of a holy God, that part of the reason Jesus had come was to place Himself as a barrier between God’s wrath and me. That He would end up absorbing it, and the only way to be safe was to run towards Him, not away from Him. I’m pretty sure that’s not what Lewis had written on that page. I just understood. And I remember thinking, “I don’t want to become a Christian! That’s so lame! Christians are lame!” But I also was sitting there thinking, “Well, I can’t pretend this isn’t true just because it’s inconvenient for my life. That also seems really stupid. I’m not going to get a better deal than this. I’ve got to take this deal.” Very transactional on some level. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I’ve fallen in love with the beauty of God.” I’m sort of like, “Ugh.” Kind of the Pascal’s wager almost. Yeah, yeah. Which I obviously didn’t know about at that point. Right, yeah. And so I didn’t have a nice pastor or campus minister sitting there with me, like, “Well, I’ll lead you in prayer,” but I kind of knew that I needed to pray. So I closed my eyes, and I was like, “Fine! I’ll become a Christian.” And it just was like, “Uh, well I guess I’ll go to class.” Like I didn’t really know what else to do, you know? It reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s story, where he claims himself to be. The most reluctant convert of all England. It’s not something he- When I read his story later, I was like, “Oh, yeah! I resonate with that.” Your story is very similar. My old dead Anglican friend. Yes. Mr. Lewis. So that was stunning for you, and I imagine it was surprising for those around you. Yeah. Yes, definitely. So you went on to class. Were you a bit subversive about your new Christian identity? Is it something that you- I didn’t know what to—the immediate aftermath, I was just sort of like, “Okay.” I don’t even remember what class I went to. It was probably one of my humanities classes, like a seminar, where you just go talk about your reading or whatever. But I know later that day I saw a little advertisement. Yale Students for Christ was going to have a Valentine’s party that Saturday. So I remember seeing that advertisement and thinking, “I didn’t even know we had a Yale Students for Christ.” So Saturday, the 14th, Valentine’s Day happened, and I showed up at this party pretending I was there by accident, because I still didn’t even know what to do with myself, so I was like, “Oh, I just stumbled in here.” The first person I saw was this other freshman who was in my literature section, and back in the fall, when we had been talking about the Bible as literature, I mean I had a field day just sort of like stomping all over the Bible, and he had been in that section with me, and so when he saw me walk in, his face did sort of like, “Uh oh,” thing. And I saw him and recognized him and thought, “Oh, I’m in the right place.” So I went to them, and I was like, “Hi. So I became a Christian two days ago,” and they were all like, “What?” And they just sort of passed me to the other freshmen. And I was like, “Hi, here I am,” and they were like, “What?” They didn’t really know what to do with me. So they were like, “Okay, so do you want to come to freshman prayer on Monday?” And I was like, “Sure.” Then they were like, “Do you want to come to freshman Bible study on Tuesday?” I was like, “Sure.” I just followed them around like a baby quail, like copying them. Sort of like, “Oh, okay. So this is what we do. We raise our hands when we sing. We read the Bible together. We don’t ever cuss. Our music is pretty bad.” You know, just the things you needed to be a young Christian. I started spending a lot of time with them. No time with my other friends. But definitely the excitement of discovering what the Gospel was overwhelmed me. It’s crazy to me now, thinking about, as a 17-year-old, I thought that Christianity was just for stupid people, when Christianity is one of the deepest and greatest intellectual traditions that has literally ever existed. I think it was such a gift to me that the first Christians I got to do life and discipleship with were thoughtful academic people. Not perfect people. And young people, like me. But people who really did care that it was true, not just, “This is what my parents did,” or any of those types of excuses. Now it took me a long time to understand that my faith is so much more than just like memorizing a book, that actually our relationship with God is demonstrated in the lives that He wants to transform. That took a while. It’s like you learn math, you just learn math facts. You learn history, you learn history facts. So, like, Christian, learn Christian facts. I was slow on the uptake in a lot of ways. My life was so deeply imperfect as an early disciple. I mean not that it’s perfect now. A lot of failure. A lot of stupidity. But also real joy. Good answers to hard questions and good admissions to when the answers weren’t sure. Such, for me, learning about where the Bible came from and what a trustworthy document it is. Especially when you compare it to any other document in its class or time. That just gave me such a deep confidence to be able to pursue it, even in the places where there was confusion or tension, especially around what it had to say about sexuality, which is something functionally I’ve been working out for the past 18 years. So it was an intellectual explosion for me, but also ultimately it just came back to the person of Christ. I had a moment early in my discipleship where my ex-girlfriend functionally offered to get back with me, and I could’ve left the good answers. I could’ve left my new Christian friends, as great as they were. Because I did still love her in many ways. But ultimately what I couldn’t leave was Christ. I couldn’t leave Him. And so it’s not just an intellectual thing, but that intellectual piece, it’s been really helpful for me in a lot of ways. You found the substance, the riches, like you say, the depth of Christian thinkers and the Christian worldview, that many have no idea about. It, for some, seems very- And I don’t blame them, frankly. The way that Christianity is lived out in our country would not ever give you a clue as to the depth of its intellectual rigor and joy. What’s comforting to me is when the Lord talks to His people in the scriptures, they’re just always failing, so I’m like, “Well, we’re not unique in the fact that we fail. I think our failures are grievous, and I do lament them, but I don’t blame people when they think of Christianity as all kinds of silly things. Because a lot of us have made it look silly. You have come such a long way, it sounds like, in your life. Having that perspective on one side of thinking Christianity is silly, for ignorant people, it’s just nonsense, now to the place where you’re actually engaged in the riches of the intellectual depth of Christian worldview and deep in your relationship with Christ. I’m so impressed that you actually, at a very pivotal point in your life, actually chose Christ, and whatever relationship you had with Him and whatever He offered you was so much more important than your personal choice of how you would’ve rather lived your life. But it was… You wanted to live how Christ wanted you to live because, at some point, you made that conversion over from pleasing yourself to pleasing Christ. It’s never easy. That decision. And that’s an ongoing choice for all of us, all of the time. Fighting against our own desires for the sake of the one who saved us, right? The one who is that barrier, the one who loved us so. That Gospel that you spoke of is transforming when you understand the depth and riches of His love for you. Wow. Your story has taken a great 180 change. Well, the Lord has a good sense of humor. Yeah, I would imagine you would’ve never seen yourself as being in this place. No, not even remotely. Not even remotely. Because I think you referenced at the very beginning, when you talked about who you are and what you do, that you are actually engaged in some kind of ministry. It’s not that this is just for you. You believe in it, and you live it, and you love it so much that you want others to know Christ in the same way that you do. Tell me about that. I do. Absolutely. I want everyone to know there’s a God Who made them and forgives them and Who wants to actually—He wants us to thrive. And sometimes we just see the things God says no to, and we miss his bigger yeses. But also I want to approach the people in my life who do not know the Lord with the respect that they deserve. We need to prove. We need to show the evidence that God is good. Not because He’s shown himself bad, but because we’ve not done a good job representing Him. I always want to approach the people in my life invitationally and taking them seriously. I take seriously the objections and the arguments of other people. They’ve got really valid experiences. I really want people to know who He is, and if I don’t actually love the person in front of me, I don’t think there’s any way for that to happen. I think there’s deep wisdom there. Also a heart for others and probably a lot of experience at engaging, especially at the college level. You’re a campus minister of sorts? Yeah. I am a campus minister. I’m not on campus with students right now because of my PhD and my role with the theological team. I do different trainings of our staff and stuff, but honestly, even—the street that I live on. None of my neighbors know or trust the Lord. But I love them deeply, and I have real relationship with them, and it’s an opportunity to learn from them and also share with them. They’re delightful. It’s not just a thing that happens. In college, we’re all allowed to talk about big ideas. Actually, other people want to talk about big ideas, too, but they want to talk about them when they know that you actually care what they think, too. I think that’s profound and so needed among our conversation and on our walk today as Christians. You do engage with those who don’t believe, and if someone is a curious skeptic actually listening in and listening to you and to your story, what would you advise someone who actually may be a closet curious skeptic, like you were at one time? Perhaps looking on the internet and all sorts of places, trying to figure out what Christianity is. What would you say to a curious skeptic? Well it so depends because personality wise we’re all very different. The things that draw us are different. But you cannot go wrong with looking to Christ, like who is He? Who are His claims? Do they hold up? We have all the tools of the professional historian to be able to tell whether things are strong arguments or weak arguments, probable or improbable, and I think if you examine Christ, who He is historically, who He is ethically, He just holds up. And He came for us. He didn’t have to come. He came for us. I would even encourage people frankly to pray. I don’t think it hurts, “God, give me Your Spirit. Help me understand.” I mean you might feel stupid. You might not really believe it. But the Lord loves to answer weak and silly prayers sometimes, you know? He came to save the lost and to meet the seeker and to answer questions and to open the door to people who knock. So I think we’ve just got to keep knocking. Perhaps even read Mere Christianity. Like you did. Yeah maybe. Or perhaps read something great, like The Reason for God by Tim Keller or Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin. There are some really good contemporary books that talk about some of these things as well. Yeah, I think that’s great advice, and we will definitely include all of your recommendations in the episode notes. Is there anything else about your story that you would like to include here as we wrap up? Just that I don’t want anyone to hear my story and laminate it onto anyone else. We each have our own experience in front of the Lord, and what happened in my life isn’t anything that I achieved or anything I should really be praised for. It was just the movement of the Lord, and so if we want the Lord to move in our life, we need to look for Him and ask for it, and if we want the Lord to move in other people’s lives, we need to ask for it. We need to be prayerful people and expect that God’s ways are going to be a little different than we might choose but that He is still good. I think, at the end of the day, it looks like you actually found the One who is true, good, and beautiful. Yeah. I know you were searching for that, and there is a depth and a richness, riches in Christ that can really be found nowhere else, and so I thank you for your story and for the way that you’ve been transparent with your life and just deeply vulnerable. So I think that that’s incredibly important, too, as we approach other people that we demonstrate a life transformed but also we’re not afraid to show and to tell the ways that we were, the ways that we still struggle, and the ways that the Lord has brought us unto Himself. So thank you for your story today, Rachel. Yeah, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Former atheist Dr. Mike Bird tells his story of moving from a culturally-informed skepticism and caricatured Christianity to finding that perhaps his presumptions were mistaken. You can find out more about Mike here: Twitter: @mbird12 Blog: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/ Books: The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians (2019) How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature – A Response to Bart D. Ehrman (2014) Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction (2013) Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining me today. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Whether or not an atheist or a Christian or something else, you have a view of reality. For most of us, we’ve typically caught our view of the world, rather than taught it. Just like the coronavirus, we’re constantly exposed to different ideas, even when we don’t or even can’t recognize or escape them. We hear and see messages from movies and music and news media and social media. Sometimes obvious, sometimes much more subtle. We tend to absorb messages without questioning, without really thinking about it. Messages slip in the back door and tell us how to think, what is true, and we believe it. Unfortunately, in our polarized culture, we often believe the negative stereotypes of the other side without really listening to what that side really is or what that other person really thinks. Guarding our own position will do. Sitting down with another person is, well, too personal, too demanding, and perhaps too vulnerable. It’s easier to build a straw man and knock it down than to really engage with the ideas and the people who believe them. It’s easier to construct stereotypes and caricatures and dismiss without consideration. But what if we are dismissing something before we even give it a chance? What if we are missing something, something that actually answers life’s biggest questions in a way that is good and true and life giving? What if, just what if we actually listen without shutting down and turning off? We might be amazed at what we find. That’s why I love the story that we’ll be listening to today. It’s the story of someone who had listened to the messages of culture, readily stereotyped and dismissed Christians as totally irrelevant, and yet today finds himself on the other side, because he took the time to figure out what Christianity really was and who Jesus really is. Michael Bird was a former atheist that is now a Christian. He is a brilliant academic who writes and speaks in the areas of theology and apologetics. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mike. Well, thank you for having me. So, as we’re getting started, Mike, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, your academic background, and what you do right now, and then we’ll start at the beginning of your story. Okay. Well, I am Michael Bird. I am the academic dean and lecturer in theology at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve lived pretty much most of my life in Australia, growing up mostly in Brisbane, although I’ve done a few stints in different places around Australia, and I also lived in Scotland for a number of years. I am also married to my wonderful wife, Naomi, and together, we have four children. I graduated from Malyon College in Brisbane and the University of Queensland, where I did my doctorate on Jesus and the Origins of the Gentile Mission. I’ve written and edited around about 30 or so books on the early church, Jesus, the New Testament, theology, Christian thought, probably am most well known for a book, The New Testament in its World, which I co-wrote with Tom Wright, and a textbook called Evangelical Theology. So that, in a nutshell, is where I am and who I am. That’s quite impressive, I must say. Set the context for us in terms of the world you grew up in and the way that they looked at religion and Christianity. Yeah. Australia is a very peculiar country on the religious front. We were founded, or settled—this is obviously after or beside the local indigenous population. We were settled largely as a penal colony for the British, largely after another colony decided they no longer wanted to be in league with Britain, which I think would be your own America. So for roughly 200 years, Australia’s been settled, and it’s never really been known for having strong or very big religious commitment. And when Australia became federated as its own country in 1900, it was created to be deliberately secular, but secular in the sense it wasn’t going to be sectarian. We did not want to import the debates and divisions from United Kingdom largely between Protestant and Catholic and the fragmentation of Protestantism, so the Australian political setup could be described as something of a half way house between the British system and the American system, so our constitution is almost like a British appropriation of the American constitution when it comes to religion. We have kind of like a free exercise clause and sort of a non-establishment cause as well. We have had a few moments of religious revival in Australia, mostly associated with the 1959 Billy Graham Crusade, which did have a big impact on the demographics and the religious contours of Australia. So Australia itself is sort of, in some sense culturally secular. It does have a Christian background. It’s generally had relative high rates of religious identification but not necessarily high rates of religious participation. And since the Second World War and the immigration that we’ve had, we’ve become religiously far more diverse, with people coming to Australia from all around the world, especially from Asia, since we’re closer to Asia than we are to the rest of the world. So Australia is a multicultural secular country. And it’s interesting. It’s different to America in many regards. We have more Buddhists than we have Baptists, for an interesting statistic. The largest denominations are, first of all Catholic, then Pentecostal, and then third Anglican. I can also say, of our twenty largest churches in Australia, all but one are Pentecostal in terms of their size. Only about I think maybe 10% to 15% of Australians would be involved with a church on a regular basis, and if you’re going for a real sort of core religious devotion, who attend church regularly, you’re looking at maybe 5% of the population. Someone once said that religion in Australia is something of a private affair. Australians like the idea of other people being religious. They like the idea of other people being religious, but they don’t like the idea of having to do it themselves. But things, I think, have turned fairly more negative since the 1990s, where religion is now associated largely with terrorism in the case of Islam and clergy sexual abuse in regards to the Catholic Church, and I think Christians can generally be regarded almost as like a right-wing pressure group in some sense. So we do have a somewhat adversarial context. In fact, on some global indices, Australia doesn’t have large amounts of government coercion in religion, but we do have a high rate of social hostility towards religion, and that can express itself in Islamophobia, antisemitism, and in attacks on churches. I’m an Anglican priest, and I’ve worn my clerical attire in downtown Melbourne only twice, and both times I’ve been attacked, once verbally, once physically. So it can be a somewhat adversarial context,  someone once described religion in Australia for most people—most Australians kind of float on a sea of apathy with a thin veneer of hostility, which is probably the best way to describe what religion is like in Australia. So talk with me, then, about the context of religion in your home and in your community growing up. Yeah. I grew in a fairly secular household in suburban Brisbane, where religion was pretty much a nonentity. We didn’t go to church. No one was particularly devout. There was no real religion. I think my stepfather had some sort of connection with his mother, who I think was Catholic or perhaps Orthodox. I don’t know for certain. My mother would really verbally abuse Jehovah’s Witnesses if they ever came to the door. She was not particularly interested in any sort of religious conversation. She also could be quite adversarial. Growing up, I had a little bit of religious education at school. My mother just sent me off to Church of England because that’s vaguely what she felt connected with since we were from the United Kingdom. There was the odd TV show. But pretty much growing up the only sort of religious influence I had was from watching Ned Flanders on the TV sitcom The Simpsons. That was pretty much the amount of education in Christianity, which meant most of what I understood and saw of it was based more on caricature or reputation than actual substance or actually knowing any Christians. I didn’t really know any Christians. And everything I thought and believed of them was largely based on this cultural caricature that I would see in various places. So the stereotype is what you saw, and that wasn’t a very positive image of Christianity. No, no. Yeah, that’s right. It was definitely sort of negative. People had a very determinist… God said so, so I believe it. That settles it. And a kind of blind faith. And willing to do things that were irrational and immoral in the Name of God. So there really wasn’t much in your world that gave any kind of a positive image of Christianity at all. You didn’t know anyone personally. There was very little in the culture of lived or embodied Christianity, so the only thing that you were getting is from, I guess, a little bit of religious education at school and the negative messaging from culture. So it painted a fairly negative portrait for you. Nothing appealing about it, I presume. Nothing worth consideration. Yeah? There was no sort of initial enticement. I didn’t really read the Bible. I may have seen the odd, I mean, like at 5 AM if I got up early enough, there may have been some sort of Christian Broadcasting Network cartoon, the odd maybe Easter Day Parade, something like that, maybe some vague suggestion of Christianity, but for the most part, it was simply a nonentity in the world that I grew up in and inhabited. So it was totally just irrelevant. It was off the radar in a sense. Or if it came across the radar, it wasn’t pretty. Yep. That’s correct, that’s correct. So I presume the same for your friends and anyone around you, that it was just off the radar, just not a consideration. Yeah. That’s right. I mean, out of all of my friends, none of them were religious. None of them went to church. We never discussed things about the nature of reality or God or the hereafter or who was Jesus. It was definitely the case where religion was simply a nonentity. So you grew up that way, through school and despite whatever religious education you had. In religious education, did they talk about Christianity at all? They did, they did. You would normally have the equivalent of a local school’s Sunday school teacher would come and teach us, and we’d sing a few songs, things like “Rock My Soul on the Bosom of Abraham,” which was fun. I didn’t mind that when you’re six, seven, or eight and you have this one hour of singing some funky songs. A little bit of a Bible story, which was mostly, I think, more moralisms than anything else. It’s not like we were being taken through the Nicene Creed or anything. It was not terribly theological. Mike, as you were graduating and finishing high school, was there anything at that point, that pivotal point in your life where you were thinking about what was ahead, were there any religious touch points there? Yeah, you know what? In hindsight, there was one. There was one. Now I have to say, for me, high school was a miserable experience. I had a very difficult home life. I had parents who were going through addiction issues and mental health issues, and it was a really miserable time. I didn’t have too many friends. I was okay academically. I got bullied a lot. Girls didn’t really like me in any sense. And it was a difficult time, so I was very eager to leave. And I’ve never been back to a high school reunion, but the last day of high school was weird. And it was weird because we had this like graduation speech. It wasn’t like a big American graduation. It was just a little bit more low key. But it was a weird day. They brought out three different speakers, and one was a local businessman who was explaining how he got his restaurant up and going, and we also had a wonderful doctor come in, and then the local Baptist pastor got up, and I thought, “Oh, man! Could this be any worse?” And he went up and gave a few things you can’t do and you shouldn’t do with your life. But he did say something which did lodge in my mind, and years later, I would recall it. And again, I don’t know why it stuck because at the time it was just water off a duck’s back at the time. He said, “The most important decision you’ll ever make is whether you choose to accept or reject Jesus Christ.” And he said it with such pathos. He said it with real conviction. Now, at the time, I just said, “Okay, fine, whatever.” It didn’t mean anything. But I remembered his words, and I remember that day vividly, and it wasn’t until I went back, actually, as I would do later on down the track of visiting a church. Eventually, those words were recalled to me. I don’t remember a lot what happened to me in high school. I don’t remember anything about trigonometry or algebra. I got some basic typing skills, but that is literally… Besides typing, I got nothing good out of high school. Just that and a lot of bad memories. But I remember that Baptist pastor’s words, that the greatest decision you’ll ever make is whether you choose to accept or reject Jesus Christ. And years later, a few years later, that did resonate with me, and I have to say the man was right. So religion to you at that time, it was a class in school, perhaps a few moral precepts, but what was religion? Was it just something that people needed or that people made up? What did you think religion was? Religion was something that other people did that I didn’t need. And I didn’t really understand what it was about. It was something I haven’t given, to be honest, a lot of thought about. It was like some people like ice hockey. It was kind of like at that level. That’s what other people do, and I’m not other people. It was of no interest and concern to me, and I’d only had very limited exposures to certain aspects of it or its messaging. So it was just something curious, a hobby that people did, but that was about it. So you’re going through high school and you graduate from high school, and what’s next on your journey? Well, number one was to get away from my parents. My mother and stepfather were quite dysfunctional in their relationships. They both had some addiction issues. Home was not a terribly pleasant place for me. Living with them was spasmodically abusive in several different ways. The problem was I couldn’t go off to college or university because my grades weren’t that good. I was basically like a B student. I got good marks but for fairly easy subjects, which doesn’t work out well when you’re calculating your score to go into university, and that was difficult, so I couldn’t go off and do a course on psychology or criminology like I was hoping to do. I could maybe have done something like meat works inspection or horticulture at a regional university for farming or something. But that had no real interest to me. So the next option was to go and join the Australian Army, which was an odd decision, since I was certainly not built to be a soldier. When I was 17, I weighed about 47 kg, which is I think about 140 or 150 pounds, so joining the Army, going through the training, was physically, mentally, emotionally quite draining and quite taxing on a scrawny 17-year-old, but that’s what I went off and did next. So what was your experience like in the Army? I guess that didn’t… Or did it bring you any closer to God along your journey? Or did it push you farther away? I think it did draw me a little bit closer in several ways. The good thing is, it gave me a distraction. It helped me develop physically, mentally, and emotionally, and to fully mature from an adolescent into a proper adult, we would say. So it was good in my personal development. And when you’re part of the army, they do have chaplains, and those chaplains are, more often than not, a very good pastoral source. They’re there to help and advocate on behalf of the soldiers and the airmen and women and naval personnel and the like, so I’d go along to chapel once a week, because we all had to go, so that’s what we all did. And we’d spend a few days with the chaplains, doing things like character formation, and you got a few snippets of Christian faith. That wasn’t too bad. But there was nothing particularly like a lightning bolt. No aha moment. It was just a few snippets or a few appearances of their faith, but there was nothing that really rocked my world or shook me in any way. But I did mention it, and I did come across some genuine Christian people, and it was when I got to my first unit. I mean I ended up becoming, of all things, a paratrooper as my first posting. I did meet some Christians, though, who I worked with, one of whom invited me along to church. And yeah, I went along. I was kind of bored because pretty much all I was doing was working hard during the day and just going out with guys at night to a pub or a nightclub, and I was getting pretty bored and sick and tired of that, so I thought I’d just do anything, and so I got invited to go along to church, and yeah, just out of curiosity and boredom, I went along. And I was expecting this church to be filled with a bunch of moralizing geriatrics, sort of people who were worried that somewhere, somehow someone was smiling. And I went along to this church, and it was nothing like that. They weren’t a bunch of senile, moralizing geriatrics. They were just very nice, normal people. They were schoolteachers, mums, dads, kids, teenagers, accountants, plumbers, secretaries, and the like. And I got to know some of them, and they were very, very kind and nice to me, and they opened themselves up to me, opened up their homes to me, I got to know them, and I realized there was something different about them. Something very different. And it wasn’t just that they were nice people with good manners. There was something truly different about them. The difference was they knew the Lord Jesus Christ. And I kept going along to this church and eventually I heard the gospel message, that God sent Jesus to be our reconciler. He died on the cross for my sins, and He rose from the dead, and He offers us eternal life and a place with His family, and in 1994, I prayed to receive Christ, and the world was a different place after that and has been ever since. What do you mean by that? The world has been a different place. I guess, for me, things changed in my life. I had more joy in my life. I was less somber and melancholic, so I had a new sense of profound joy. Another thing I had is I just felt myself alive in a new way. There were also certain habits I won’t go into, but there were certain things… Certain desires in my life changed. There were certain things I no longer desired, so I had a reordering of my desires, so there was a change on that ground. And I felt myself drawn to doing things I would not otherwise have normally done, like reading the Bible. I developed an insatiable hunger to read the Bible and know more about it and to go to God, in my own church to the morning service. They didn’t have an evening service, so I went to a different church for the evening service. And that type of a thing. I was very comfortable talking about my faith and what I believed, and I even started doing, on my own, my own initiative, a little bit of lay apologetics and that type of thing. So it was that wonderful joy and glow of new life that I think I was experiencing. It sounds like it was quite a transformation. You mentioned that you started reading the Bible. Had you ever read the Bible before that time in your life? What did you think that the Bible was? What did you find that perhaps was unexpected? Was it more than you thought it would be, I guess. Yeah. It certainly was far more than I thought it would be. I mean I didn’t grow up with people quoting the Bible. I mean you’d hear the odd reference to it here and there. If anything, I might of got a little bit of Bible via Shakespeare or something like that. But I did not grow up in a home, a school, a family, a culture where the Bible is frequently quoted and mentioned. And it’s a culture where it’s very easy to be biblically illiterate and to not even know that you’re illiterate and that kind of thing. So reading the Bible for me was a brand new event, and there were all these things here, and I remember the first time I read the Gospel of John, that was an amazing experience. Looking at this Jesus, the God man who promises us eternal life. Reading Paul’s letter to the Romans for the first time. These are all very important and eye-opening things that cause these various lights in your spiritual life to suddenly flicker on, and you becoming thinking and reflecting. “Okay, what does it mean to live a life of holiness?” “What does it mean to obey the law of Jesus?” “How do I be a good Christian?” That type of a thing. So reading the Bible was a profound experience, and it took me a while. Initially, I would read a bit, but then, as I kept reading more and more and more, I got a real big hunger for it, and I really enjoyed learning about what was in there and I enjoyed the sermons. I enjoyed the reflection. And being able to understand what was going on. I enjoyed attending Bible study. I enjoyed being discipled via a very, very lovely young pastor. So it was a real good time of initial warmth, hunger, and growth in the Christian faith. That sounds wonderful! I’d like to back up for just a moment because, as I’m sitting here thinking that you went to church and you were expecting a rather senile version of Ned Flanders to be there and that’s not what you found. You found a group of warm and loving people that were quite different qualitatively in their life, and it was attractive. There was something that drew you in. You understood the gospel, and it obviously felt true or rang true enough to you that you accepted it as true. As an atheist moving into that, you obviously were open to what you were finding. You were actually surprised. Perhaps maybe your stereotypes were broken down. And you found something good, but there’s a difference, I guess, between, “Wow, this is good, and these people seem good, and the message seems good,” and it being substantively true. More than just a story. It is a story. There are a lot of religious stories. But what is it about Christianity… As an atheist moving into that, and it sounds like you moved towards Christianity quite quickly, did you have any doubts? Were you scratching your head, saying, “This sounds good, but is it too good to be true? Is it historically true?” Did those questions come into your mind? Yeah. They did a bit. Probably two ways. I would say the first thing was, becoming a Christian, it allowed things in my world to suddenly make sense. Now, I kind of recognized if there was no God, then ultimately we were living in a nihilistic universe and that everything about human life was… Ethics was… I wouldn’t have used this language at the time, but ethics without God or something transcendent is just a game with words. And is quite meaningless and is just something we pretend. We pretend that certain things are wrong. Whether you push an old lady in front of a bus or help her across the road, you could argue that, in an atheist universe, these actions are meaningless. They have no objective or real moral quality. They’re just things we project onto them. And what you project onto them is no more authoritative than what someone else might project onto them. So I knew that I lived in a morally meaningless universe. The problem was I couldn’t live without moral meaning, and I knew some things were absolutely wrong, some things were evil, but I did not have a metaphysics that could support that kind of ethic. So when I became a Christian, it was suddenly the lights tripped on, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah! This is the reason why I believe evil exists.” “This is the reason why I believe in good.” “This is why people look at the stars and kind of wonder about things divine or heavenly.” A whole bunch of things made sense. That was kind of the more transcendental aspect of how believing in God allowed me to make sense of the world I experienced, rather than this sort of fragmented way I experienced things, of which atheism or unbelief was just something you had to put up with and just live with the contradiction of having a morally meaningless world but believing that things are morally meaningful. On the other side, the question was who was Jesus? And I became convinced fairly quickly that he wasn’t just a religious teacher. He wasn’t myth. He wasn’t legend. He was a real historical person. I read on that a little bit, and I was convinced. I also began watching a few William Lane Craig debates around the same time, and that had a very profound effect on me, too. William Lane Craig was a brilliant communicator, brilliant defender of the faith. I think early in my faith I actually wrote to him, back in the mid 1990s, and he kindly wrote back to me. And that was very encouraging. So I got into a little bit of apologetic stuff around that same time, reading the usual classics, More Than a Carpenter and Evidence that Demands a Verdict and a bit of R.C. Sproul, a bit of this, bit of that. But I think, yeah, atheism makes great boasts, like Ozymandias in that poem.  But it doesn’t really deliver. It claims to have the master story of the universe, but it’s a fairly bleak and sad view of the universe and one that didn’t actually make sense of my experience as a human being. So it sounds like existentially, morally, and even intellectually, the pieces were starting to come together, so that you could make sense of life in a very holistic way, rather than, like you say, just trying to make sense from fragments of things within atheism that couldn’t provide that sense of cohesion in terms of making sense of your morality and your desire for meaning and purpose and all those things. Yeah. That’s exactly right. And it was like there was a whole… It’s kind of like being in a room where all the lights are off, and then, one by one, all the lights begin to flicker on, and you suddenly see the pattern, you suddenly see what’s around you, and your environment begins to make sense. And that’s just basically how it was. And it’s remained that way pretty much ever since. My world makes a lot more sense to me now as a Christian than it ever did before. So, Mike, it sounds like you started developing a thinking faith and that you started pursuing apologetics. Can you talk about what apologetics is, for those who are listening who have no idea what that term means? Yeah. Apologetics is the defense of the Christian faith against criticism, whether that’s coming from atheists, Muslims, or anyone who says it ain’t necessarily so. There is no God, or Jesus is just not God or anything like that. I did a discipleship course with my pastor, and we went through all sorts of things. What is the Bible? Who is Jesus? And all sorts of questions like that. And I got really interested in that. And the good thing was, the pastor I was with, he could see that I was getting into the more intellectual side of things, and he really supported me and encouraged me in that. In fact, after two years of being at that church and being very well discipled, it was time for me to move on to a different posting in northern Australia, and as a going-away present, the pastor gave me a copy of Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, which I thought was quite… how would you call it? A kind of foreshadowing of the direction I was soon to go into. So I devoured Erickson’s Christian Theology. It was a very good little textbook introducing me to systematic theology or Christian thought, and that was terrific. And then when I moved to Townsville in northern Australia I attended another really good church with another really great group of pastors. And they had one chap there who was a Southern Baptist pastor from Georgia. He was from Griffin, and he helped pastor the church and run a little theological college as an annex to the church, and I got into more theological education while I was there. I took courses on 1 Corinthians, on basic Christian beliefs, and that type of thing, and I learned more from that, and that’s when I decided I wanted to leave the army and go to theological college, maybe with a view to becoming an army chaplain or maybe doing something like becoming a seminary professor. So eventually I did end up doing a bit of theological education and really craving more. It sounds like you really found something very rich, worth studying, and you also, from a B student, it sounds like also that you really moved towards a very strong intellectual bent. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s right. I did have a kind of natural sort of a writing ability, which I had a little bit in high school. It never got refined or polished, but I did have a kind of writing ability. And when I moved out of infantry and went into military intelligence, I was then in an environment where you’re having to take in a lot of information, process it, and then write reports and give oral presentations to very important people, and that helped refine my abilities all the more. So after a few years of that, I think I was really ready to start tertiary study. I was disciplined. I was motivated. And I think a gifting was beginning to open up in my ability to study and explain the Bible and Christian thought. It sounds like you’ve moved very far from your perceived caricaturing of Christian faith as Ned Flanders. You are no Ned Flanders. You are very, very far from that. The people that you met broke down your stereotypes, and then you’ve become something… someone extremely respectable intellectually, that you understand the grounding for your faith, that you live in a way that makes Christianity plausible and complex in a good way. It’s very rich. It sounds like you have a fullness of life that makes sense from every perspective. You’ve come a very long way, to the point where I guess you’ve invested your life in the Christian worldview and not only knowing more and more about it but also teaching it. You said you’re a college professor and a writer? Yeah. Yeah. I’ve pretty much committed myself, everything to this. The advance of the gospel, the building up of the church, proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. I’ve enjoyed the many institutions I’ve taught at the Highland Theological College, the Brisbane School of Theology, and now, more recently at Ridley College. That’s quite a life transformation, I must say. As we’re thinking about your life and really the insights and perspectives that you’ve gained in moving from atheism to Christianity, knowing what it’s like as an atheist and thinking very little of the Christian faith, but now finding that it really is everything to you, if you could speak to the nonbeliever or perhaps a curious skeptic who’s listening, what would you want to say to them? I would say don’t rely on the caricatures you have received around you for what Christianity is about. Now that can be very different in different places in the world. If you’re somewhere like… well maybe like where you are, in Georgia, where there is certainly a very strong history and culture of Christianity, but in many ways it can be at the level of the culture. That type of a thing. And it can be easy to assume there’s a certain hypocrisy. But if you actually meet genuine Christians, people who know their Christian faith and who are earnestly committed to it, I think you’ll discover that they are far more different than what you’ve assumed about them, or what you’ve been told about them. And it can lead to many pleasant, wonderful, and astounding surprises when you see Christian faith not as a political tool, not something of cultural conditioning but of real conviction, of real spiritual depth and richness. If you meet those kind of people, they certainly will transform everything you believe about Christian faith, about who is God and importantly who is Jesus. I think that’s good advice. It’s always good to look into what you really don’t understand, to take another look, to pull back the layers a little bit and see if your presumptions are right or mistaken. I think you were actually willing to do that when you were willing to actually even go to a church service, which I think probably a lot of people wouldn’t do. But you were actually willing to actually take a look. And you found something very different than what you expected. I think that’s really great advice. To Christians or believers, perhaps in addressing and engaging with those who really don’t understand Christianity or perhaps perceive Christianity in a very caricatured way, how would you encourage Christians to live in this very secularized culture that we have today? I think the number one thing I would say is, if you’re going to make a difference, you need to be different. And you can’t simply imitate the worst of the culture around you. If you are different in your disposition, your attitude, your joy, the things that you run from and the things that you run to. If you can embody the story of Jesus Christ in your own relationships, people around you will notice. They may not tell you they notice, but they will notice. The authentic living out of Christian faith is one of the best apologetic strategies that you can provide. You may not be a world-class debater like a William Lane Craig. You may not be a biblical scholar. You may not have the answer to everyone’s question, but if you can show that Jesus really does make a difference in your life and in how you treat other people, I think that will speak volumes to the people around, and even those who may not believe with you will at least respect you for your conviction and your Christlikeness. Excellent. Excellent. Mike, this has been such a pleasure to have you on the Side B Podcast, to hear your story. It’s been intriguing and interesting and really quite wonderful to hear from someone who’s made quite a leap, quite a change in your journey. I do wonder, as a last question, those around you in your life, in your world, your friends and family. Once you became a Christian, how was that accepted? Did anyone push back with you on that? Oh, yeah, yeah. My parents did not take the news well. When I told them I’ve been going to church, it was like, “Church!” I mean they did not respond particularly well, and they just thought it was a phase I was going through, like if you change sporting teams or something. They thought it was just a phase I was going through. But it’s a phase that’s been going on now for well over 20 years, I have to say, some 25 years I would have to say. So they were quite negative and quite abrupt, and they could even be quite… particularly my mother could be quite condescending and malicious about it, which was disappointing. Some of my immediate friends were a little bit weirded out, but they just… “Okay, fair enough. Okay, Mike. That’s who Mike is now, and who he is and what he does,” so yeah, that was kind of… It was a little bit difficult. But I’d also established a whole bunch of new friends. I mean the other thing is, being in the army, you kind of have to pick up and move every few years, anyway, so I was able to make new friends largely through the churches I visited in my various travels. Very good. Yeah. It’s hard that you can’t predict how people around you will respond, but obviously it was worth it, whatever that you found was worth it. I guess the disappointment around you. But hopefully they can see, as you encouraged Christians to be embodied, that they can see that the difference was worth it. And that they, even though, like you say, they may not say anything, they certainly notice. Yeah. So thank you again, Mike, for being part of the show, and I just appreciate your time and your coming on, and we loved having you on. Okay. Well, thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure. All blessings to you and your listeners. Thanks for listening to the Side B Podcast to hear Mike’s story. You can hear more from Mike by looking at his books, his blogs, and his Twitter account, all of which I’ve included in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this new podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

We presume we are right and correct in our beliefs. But, sometimes we are challenged to consider why we believe what we do. In today’s podcast, former atheist Robert Kunda takes a closer look at his atheistic presumptions, opening him to new possibilities. Robert mentioned the influence of these Christian thinkers: Hugh Ross (on science): https://reasons.org/about/hugh-ross C.S. Lewis (argument from desire): Mere Christianity William Lane Craig (debates): www.reasonablefaith.org James White (debates): https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/bio/jwhite.html The Side B Podcast was recently listed as #16 on Top 35 Christian Women Podcasts. Check out the full list now! Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Life is busy. Who has time to think about God when there’s so much else to do? To think about and consider? We simply presume we’re right no matter which side we’re on. Many atheists presume that science has made religion passe. We no longer need the God hypothesis to explain anything. Christianity is not plausible but rather mere superstition. Thinking people have no time or desire to deal with it. It’s simply off the radar. In my research with over 50 former atheists, nearly two-thirds, 63%, thought that atheism was true and no evidence could convince them otherwise. But in light of the fact that I was interviewing former atheists who had become Christians, it begged the question: What made someone so closed off to God open up and become willing to change. That’s the million dollar question. I hasten to add that, as a group, these were highly educated people. Nearly half held advanced degrees. These are thoughtful people who, for some reason, decided to take another look at the God question and found themselves strongly believing and advocating what they had once thought was not important or just plain nonsense. Sometimes looking more closely, beyond mere presumptions of belief, causes someone to become open to another perspective, especially if their own worldview doesn’t seem to be providing adequate answers to the questions they’re asking, whether it be science or other questions of life or even death. That’s the case for the former atheist in our podcast today. Robert Kunda tells his journey from disbelief in God to belief. He was challenged to take a closer look at his atheistic presumptions, and that closer look made all the difference. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Robert. It’s so great to have you on today. Awesome. Thank you for having me. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, perhaps where you live. My name’s Robert Kunda. I live in southern Oregon, Grant’s Pass specifically, with my wife and our three dot dot dot kids. We have two girls and a boy, eleven, nine, and five, but we also have a fluctuating number of kids, as we are currently foster parents. We have one 1-1/2-year-old baby who, I guess she’s almost a toddler now, but we’re hoping to adopt. So hopefully she’ll be staying around. And then just the number of foster kids we have varies at any given moment. We just had a placement. A girl that was with us for four or five months left this last Friday, and so now we technically have only the baby as a foster kid. We do have a boy and a girl that we’re watching just for a week for someone else, but they’re not living with us permanently. So you have six children in your home right now, eleven and younger? Yes. That’s a full house. A busy life, it sounds like. Amazing! It’s busy. It’s nice. My wife stays home. She homeschools our kids, which is something that she always wanted to do, which is something that we’d never have been able to afford when we were in southern California, so the lower cost of living up in Oregon is helpful. It’s nice. I want to know about the kind of place you grew up that helped to inform and shape your views.  I wonder about your childhood experience. Your family, your community. Were there references to God at all? Or Christianity? Or religion? And what did that look like? Kind of. In my house, not so much. For maybe three or four years, when we were really young, when we lived out near Pomona area, it was just my mom, my sister, and I, and we were in a private Christian school for some time, because, It was a rough area. So we had weekly chapel and references to God in that school, but other than that, we didn’t go to church. My mom wasn’t a believer. We moved a lot when I was younger, basically all through high school. And after that, there was no going to church. There was no other sort of Christian exposure, except for having friends that were believers. So when you were a child growing up and you went to this Christian school, was it anything that you believed? Or was it just something that they talked about the school but it really had no personal impact on you in terms of… Did you pray to God or anything like that? Probably not. At the time, if I could go back and ask myself, I would say at least for a period of time I probably believed it. What that really actually meant… Now I wouldn’t know. Kids can often just kind of repeat things by memorization and hold multiple conflicting ideas in their heads together, but I didn’t pray. I didn’t have any sort of experience with any of it. It was just almost like another class. You moved from English to science to chapel, and it’s just information that you can kind of repeat, but I didn’t have any sort of ownership of it. And whatever was there died off in my later elementary through high school age, anyway. So you said you had some Christian friends. Would you say that they took their faith very seriously? Were they the type that were very active and intentional in their Christianity? Or was it just something that they, too, were perhaps… called themselves Christians, but it wasn’t much more than that. It was kind of a mixed bag. And when I said Christian friends, I was mostly thinking of a few of the circles of friends that I had when I was in high school. Most of them, especially the closest ones, were not Christians, but I had another circle of friends that I used to hang out with. They were all part of the same church, and I used to go with them to Christian concerts because it was fun. One of those actually ended up being my wife who I’m married to now. Oh, okay. Well, that worked out well for you. But the whole group was kind of a mixed bag. You have some that didn’t stay in any sort of Christian community after high school. You had some that, later on, fell away. And you have a couple that are still there, my wife included. So it was kind of all over the board. So as you were growing up and you saw this kind of social reference to God and Christianity and you had a few friends who called themselves that, but it’s just not something that evidently was attractive to you or meant anything to you or… How would you describe religion growing up? That’s a good question. I probably would’ve thought of it as something… almost like a preference. Like, “Certain families do this. Some families watch football on Sundays, and some like to go to church,” and it’s just… almost like a relativistic approach. Different flavors for different people. I wouldn’t have the vocabulary, but it would’ve basically been like, “Well, that’s true for you, and what’s true for me is something different. It’s all just preference.” So what was becoming true to you at that time? How old were you when you were moving towards atheism or identifying with that kind of thinking or way of looking at the world? I want to say probably early middle school age. I don’t really remember thinking anything about it at all. I don’t think I really had much of an opinion. Through high school, I would say I strongly ventured towards the atheism side. I’m trying to think what the best way to describe it would be. Was it school or education? Were you influenced by your science classes? What was it, do you think, that was influencing you towards atheism? Yeah, I would say it’s probably all of those. Secular naturalism was definitely prevalent as far as the worldview that was presented in school, which I adopted without question. Predominantly, my family and closest friends, none of them were Christian, so I just kind of, basically from every end, that’s the way I adopted it. Also my home growing up wasn’t wonderful, so… Again, I wouldn’t have had the categories for it at the time, but the existential problem of evil was something that I felt tremendously without any sort of answer for, and I’m like, “The world’s too ugly for there to be a God.” Right, right. So it was really a combination of a lot of different things in your world, your home, your experience, your observation of the world, your friends, school. Did your science classes kind of feed into that understanding, too? You mentioned secular naturalism. For those who may not be familiar with that, can you describe what that is? Or what that was that you believed? Yeah. I was taught macro evolution in school. You’re really not taught anything spiritual, for lack of a better world. The material world is all that exists. There’s nothing that’s immaterial. Yeah. And it just made sense to you? It was just a pragmatic view of life? Yeah. It wasn’t really a view that I was argued into. It was just sort of the underlying presupposition of everything, and that’s just how I viewed everything. Yeah. So it was just kind of a presumed point of view. Right. If you had this kind of presumed perspective of life, naturalism. Did you consider any of the implications that might come along with that way of thinking? In terms of what it meant for your life or your own humanity, freedom, conscience, right and wrong, anything? Purpose, death? Yeah, I would say it’s kind of a mixed bag. On one end, the morality idea was a big one. I mean, I was like, “There’s no bearded man in the sky that makes doing this or that wrong or right or obligatory.” So I wasn’t really persuaded by a theistic case for the necessity of morality at the time. By God’s grace, I’ve always had a fairly moralistic bent, as far as… I definitely made my share of mistakes, but I was nowhere near as bad as I could have been in a lot of areas. I would say the biggest impact that I had, thinking through the outworkings of atheism, was just the idea of death was terrifying. I mean, I remember I used to just agonize for hours on end… Not every day or all day, but there were periods of time where you just try to understand what the world is, what it means. I’m like, “Okay. I’m conscious. I can think about things that happen. And at some point, I’m just going to be dead, and nothing will matter. And I won’t know that it won’t matter. There’ll just be nothing. It’ll just be emptiness.” And just that thought was so terrifying. So I presume you tried not to think about that so much. Well, I don’t think it will in unconsciousness now, so it doesn’t bother me the same way it used to. But at the time it was just horrifying. You get in these kind of ruts, and you’re like, “Why does anything I do matter? Why does it mean anything?” “And in the end, I won’t know.” The idea of being able to know that you won’t know, looking forward, to me, was just so haunting. So there were some things that really bothered you as an atheist, but then you didn’t know quite what to do with them. So how does your story then progress from there? You were in high school. What did you do after high school? After high school, I went into the military. I was in the military for four years. When I came back, my mom and my stepdad had gotten divorced, and so I didn’t really have a home to go back to at the time. And so I went to go live with my former best friend from high school. He and his family were basically my second family through middle school and high school, and so I lived with them for a while. Through him, I actually got in touch with my wife, Asia. They ran into each other three, three and a half years after graduating high school, and she found out that I was coming back. She’s like, “Oh, have Robert give me a call when he gets home.” So I got a hold of her when I came back because I almost had no friends locally, so I was trying to get in touch with people that I remembered, and I got in touch with her. She, from my perspective at the time, had unfortunately still continued going to church and do all that kind of stuff, which meant, for multiple nights a week, or days a week, she was sort of occupied doing church things. And then, as we started to get closer, I became quite aware if I wanted to spend time with her I had to suffer through some of those churchy things. So she obviously took her Christian faith quite seriously if she was involved several days a week in her church. She did. She was. I mean, she went to church on Sundays and then… it escapes me. It was one or two nights a week they would usually have some sort of young adult things in the evening or church services midweek, and so I went to those occasionally as well. So was that odd, as an atheist, to go to church services? What was that like? It was. Most of the people that I interacted with were all pretty nice. I mean, I’ve typically been able to get along with most people fairly well. The church that she was in at the time, they had not wonderful theology, and so, from the atheist side looking in, it seemed extra wacky to me, and so it was easy, for a long period of time, to sort of roll my eyes and deal with the medicine that I had to swallow in order to spend time with this girl that I liked. Well, you must’ve really liked her. I did. And we’d known each other, at that point, for more than ten years. We were good friends. We never dated in high school. I did ask her to prom my senior year, and she told me no. it wasn’t a real ask. The person that she wanted to go with was unavailable, so I said, “Well, hey, I’ll go with you,” and she’s like, “No. I don’t want to go,” and so I just went with someone else. It didn’t mean much at the time, but it is funny to look back on and say that, “I asked her to prom, and she shot me down, but we ended up getting married, so in the end, I won.” Yes, you did. You sure did. So how long were you going to church with her thinking this was extra wacky and trying to make sense of what was happening? I know you probably went in with a skeptical lens, obviously. Was there any genuine curiosity to you during this time? I wouldn’t say genuine curiosity. I definitely went in with a skeptical lens. I didn’t really talk to her about it at the time. Nothing says romance like trying to beat your partner into submission by telling them how dumb they are. But because I was becoming so much more immersed in a completely different worldview, I started reading a bunch of different books, both atheist and Christian sides, because I kind of wanted to be able to mentally state explicitly why Christianity was false. And so the books I started reading were really to sort of combat that, so when I got into a discussion with someone, instead of just being like, “You’re dumb. You’re wrong,” I could be like, “Here’s why.” Right. And so what I first started reading was in order to do that. Unfortunately, it seems to have backfired, and I went the opposite direction. Fortunately now but at the time I would have considered it unfortunate. Ah. So what kinds of things were you reading? I presume, like you said, it was a fairly balanced reading on both sides? Atheism and Christianity? So I wasn’t in any sort of research program, so I didn’t really pick a well versed catalog, but I did read a couple of Christian science books. Not Christian science, but… It’s been a long time. I can’t remember all the titles, but I think I read one or two books by Hugh Ross at the time, looking at creation arguments. I read at least one or two Richard Dawkins books. Let’s see, what else? I’ve read a number of C.S. Lewis books as well. Stuff that was recommended kind of by both sides. Right. And during that time as well were you reading… Did you pick up the Bible? I’m curious, since it was the Christian text. Did you read the Bible? Intermittently. At the time, not a whole lot, not in scope. There would be times where I would go reference something or read a section, but there was no systematic reading through. Again, at the time, I didn’t think it was something worth taking seriously, so I didn’t go to the original sources. Okay, okay. But you were reading back and forth on these opposing worldviews, and you were finding, I presume, something surprising about what you were reading from Christian thinkers? Yes. Because obviously you were being persuaded towards that direction. Yeah, I think that was what sort of surprised me is, as you look at different authors, which… It wasn’t like a formal debate where they’re interacting with each other directly, but you have guys that are interacting with similar ideas, and in doing that, they’re presenting the other side and then their own arguments as to the way the world actually works, and it became fairly evident to me early on that the Christian side was much more accurate in their representation of the opposing side than vice versa. Yes, yes. So there seemed to be more fairness by the Christian authors on their view of atheism, as compared to vice versa. But you mentioned that it seemed to also provide, I guess, a clearer or more cogent view of reality. What do you mean by that? That they were able to answer some of those bigger questions? Or did the pieces seem to fit together in terms of the universe, the cosmos? You said you read Hugh Ross. Did things seem to make sense in terms of cause and effect or fine tuning or- Yeah. The two things that I think really sunk with me first was, on one hand… Lewis was very helpful to me early on, in getting me to think about certain ideas, but I want to say it was like the argument from desire. I mentioned before the idea of dying was terrifying because I don’t want to not exist anymore. And his argument was sort of that we long for fulfillment in certain areas, and Christianity can offer answers to those that are ultimately satisfying, whereas atheism cannot. Now that’s not, by itself, an argument in favor of Christianity’s truthfulness or not. Just because we want something doesn’t really make it so, but it did seem to me that many of the atheists weren’t necessarily taking the seriousness of their own implications seriously. I think this is one of the biggest issues that I’ve had with Richard Dawkins, is that he really maintains almost a Christian worldview from the perspective of being able to call things wrong, but if naturalism is true, why does he care? He’s just chemicals fizzing together in a different way than someone else. So why is he against injustices of the world? Atheists of old used to understand this, and a lot of the current atheists just completely disregard it. They want to borrow the benefits of Christian thought while casting off the foundations. And so that seemed very inconsistent to me. I would say the other side that was a big influence for me as well was I used to love listening to moderated debates with atheists and Christians on a whole variety of topics. I’ve probably listened to at least three dozen Bill Craig debates. But some of the most interesting debates were the ones for and against evolution and watching how the evolutionists conducted themselves in debates, both with their arguments and argumentativeness, was just so, frankly, embarrassing from someone at the time who was sympathetic to evolution as not only just a scientific theory but a whole worldview. Watching how poorly some of them performed and behaved themselves was just, to me, horrifying. So it was content and manner? Right. I mean, if you’re approaching it where you have the intellectual arguments in the bag and the other side is literally just making stuff up out of thin air, you should be able to present a solid argument explaining why your own view has merit, rather than just literally mocking the other side, and none of the debates that I watched did that. So was that disappointing to you in a way? That the atheists weren’t able to rise to the occasion intellectually or pragmatically, I guess you could say? Yeah. And at this point I was probably kind of mid trajectory in going some other direction, and I wasn’t sure. I wouldn’t say that it was disappointing at the time. It was illuminating, in that I was less confident in how true my outlook was at the world. I thought, “Maybe I don’t know everything that I think I do,” or, “Maybe the world isn’t the way that I have assumed it was.” Hm. And as you were moving through this process of listening to pro and con and different debates and you were reading books, were you discussing your thinking, your findings, how you were being illuminated with Asia or with any Christians or any atheists? Or were you just kind of going on this journey by yourself? It was largely by myself. At the time, I was not super eager to share some of the specifics with Asia. Because you were just trying to figure this out on your own, I presume, before- Yeah, I mean it really started off as a quest to argue against Christianity and then shifted into sort of trying to understand what I actually do believe, like what’s the proper way to understand the way world is and how it works. So it was a process, really. How long were you in this journeying of finding clarity with regard to your own thinking, as well as these worldviews? I want to say it was probably… anywhere between three to five years. I don’t know if it’s completely closed because I think I’m continuing to develop in my thinking, although at this point I think I’m much more just firming up weak points rather than a complete change in worldview, but it was a very slow, long process. I never had like a Blues Brothers moment of conversion, where all of a sudden I recognized that I believed God’s word, I believed the Gospels. It was a much more delayed, slow process, to where, at some point I understood what the material was, and eventually I crossed over into the, “Okay, I actually do believe this now,” but it was very slow, and it was not instant for me. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s conversion, where he went through a very long journeying, too. Of moving from atheism to Christianity, and then n a sense it was all of a sudden, but it was really capped on a very long process of… He said it was almost as a sleeping man becoming awake, and, “All of a sudden, I believed,” and it made sense. It’s like the pieces fell into place. I think not every conversion is any kind of a sudden, like you called it, a Blues Brothers moment. I love that. For many people, it is a gradual… I mean, when you think of the weight of shifting your worldview, of thinking reality one way and then moving towards another way of considering reality, that is… or it seems like it would be, or should be, even, a prolonged process. And like you say, it seems like a process that is ongoing. It’s not something that you can grasp fully. It’s something we’re always becoming more and more acquainted with, I guess you could say. But there must have been a point, kind of a tipping point? Would you call it something like that? And I know Christianity is not just believing evidence. That’s part of it, but it’s so much more than that, because, in Christianity, it’s not just believing certain propositions are true, it’s actually a relationship with a Person who you believe is Truth. Right. So there’s a lot more to it than that. So did that come into play? I know there’s the intellectual part, but then there’s so much more than that. So talk with me about that. I haven’t put some of this into words before. But honestly, looking back, I don’t think I would consider myself a believer until actually well after we were married. I look back, and my wife shouldn’t have married me at the time. One of her few failings in life. She ended up lucking out, and I’m quite a catch now, but I wouldn’t have encouraged to have married me back at the time. But I remember I became much less hostile to Christianity after a period of thought and consideration, but I didn’t consider myself part of the group. I became content to sort of coexist in sort of a relativistic fashion, like, “Hey, I know you guys believe all the fancy Jesus stuff, and I don’t really believe that, but I have no problems sharing a meal together,” you know, doing life together. So we dated for quite a while, and then, at some point, I actually asked her if we could leave the church that she was at because I didn’t think Christianity was true, but I knew that whatever the church that she was at the time believed wasn’t even really Christianity. And so we did. We left there and went to an EV Free church, and we were there for… Without doing the math, I want to say maybe eight or nine years. And it was over a period of years, being in that church, where I really became solidified in my conversion and confident in the faith that I had in Christ. And I think the point where that happened, that I can kind of point to, was I remember one of the pastors had called me one day and said, “Hey, it might be time for you to get baptized.” And, at first, I was like, “Well, that’s kind of a big step,” and as I was talking through it with him and I was thinking about it, I was like, “Actually, I don’t really have a problem. I think that is probably appropriate. Because I do believe these things now.” And I probably did before, but I hadn’t really codified it in my own thinking. But that was a number of years into us being married. So you moved through what you consider a conversion process, and I’m curious as to all those bits and pieces that seemed to bother you as an atheist, like issues of death and grounding morality and those kinds of things… Once you became a Christian, did you find that those things that were somewhat missing in your atheistic worldview you were able to find within your Christianity? Yeah. And I think that’s where a lot of the apologetic arguments and discussions have really helped me, much more as a believer than when I was an atheist. So that Christianity has an afterlife, to me, was never an argument in favor of Christianity. I mean, most of the religions have an afterlife, but that was not persuasive enough to say, “Oh, well therefore that worldview is right.” But now, believing that Christianity is true and recognizing that, in fact, it does have answers for those things that I thought atheism was, if not deficient on, gave answers that weren’t really fulfilling, and now, having a worldview that, in turn, does fulfill those desires is an incredible blessing, and so I found that with a lot of the apologetic arguments. Everything from the typical bag that Bill Craig carries around, the cosmological argument. That wasn’t appealing to me at the time. I’m like, “Okay, whatever. The Christian sect used fancy words,” or whatever, but now that I’m a believer and I can hear these arguments, especially a philosophical defense of Christianity, I look, and I’m like, “Wow! These are really, really good arguments,” especially when you consider them with an open mind, so to me, apologetics has been much more of a useful tool for building and strengthening the confidence that believers have in their own faith, rather than necessarily just a straight tool to evangelize with. So as you became a Christian, I guess you could say that you found the philosophical, the intellectual aspects of Christianity to be solid in terms of your ability to make sense of the world and existentially, in terms of your life, it also was fulfilling those things, and so it gave you somewhat of a fully orbed worldview, in a sense. More than what you had in your atheism. Tell me, as you became a Christian, you said you’re rather a student. Did you pursue further education. after I got out of the military, I went to just a local community college, and I was taking classes there, working towards an AA. After some period of time, I actually… I want to say maybe 2005, 2006 is when I actually enrolled in Biola. After I was firmly in the believer camp. I decided I wanted to have a more biblical education than what I was getting at a secular school, and so I enrolled in Biola. I went through my bachelor’s there, and then I ended up doing my Master’s in Apologetics there as well. Okay. So you did take this very, very seriously, in terms of grounding your own worldview. Yeah. Once they got me, they got me. Yeah. I guess you could say that, for sure. As we’re listening to your story and really considering that you’ve come quite a distance and you understand what it feels like to live and think as an atheist and live and think as a Christian, in your story you had presumptions that atheism was true but perhaps, when you took a closer look, it unearthed, some real doubts for you as you were looking at it more closely. What would you like to say to the curious skeptic who might be listening today in terms of perhaps investigating their own atheism, much less Christianity? I guess it would be twofold. On one hand, I mentioned that I really did find a lot of moderated debates very useful. I used to just Google debates and just find something that looked interesting and listen through that. And interactions between Christians and atheists on different topics was just fascinating to me, and I benefited greatly from listening to those and watching how both sides conducted their arguments, how they behaved themselves, the merits on each side, but what I would encourage is something that I didn’t do early on, and that would be to actually just expose yourself to reading the Bible, to what’s actually in scripture. I think it would’ve made my process a lot less long and less painful. It’s one of those things that, if it’s true, you’ll see, and I think it is, so I think you will, but… It’s hard to say you don’t believe something when you actually don’t look at what the thing is and you only look at it through second or third-hand sources. Yeah. That’s some good counsel. I’ve heard a lot of stories of people who were very, very surprised by what they found in the Bible when they actually read it for themselves. And for the Christian, how would you encourage them in terms of understanding the atheist more or someone who’s a skeptic or a nonbeliever or perhaps engaging with someone who has a different worldview or even equipping themselves in order to engage? Yeah. So every person, their story’s a little bit different. I mentioned my wife before. She grew up in the church. She’s always been in a Christian home. And she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t believe. On the other hand, I was well into my twenties, my mid twenties, when I was converted. And in many ways I wish that I would have grown up a Christian, because there’s a lot of baggage that I carry around now that I wouldn’t have to deal with or think back on, but in other ways, it is kind of a blessing, in that I could see literally what I was saved from, not just to but from, and I can remember what it was like. And I think a lot of the times, Christians can forget who they once were, especially on the internet, which is maybe the worst place to argue about anything, let alone Christianity, but anything. But remember the grace that you have been shown and the position that you are now in. We didn’t just realize that something’s true and someone else is just too dumb to realize it. We’re literally given a grace by God in understanding. And those that don’t have it are in no better position than we ourselves were. So just to remember where we came from. I think it was Greg Koukl who said, “The Gospel is offensive enough. Don’t add any offense to it.” Don’t take any of it away, but don’t be offensive in your delivery of it. Let God be the one that’s offensive, and let that be the mark that people remember and not your own manners and your presentation themselves. I think that’s wise counsel. It makes me curious. When you were dating Asia for a period of time, did she allow you space? Was she pressuring you at all towards Christianity? Or did she allow you space for you to move at your own pace towards this journey that you were on to find truth? Yeah. To be honest, we actually didn’t really talk about it. It wasn’t really front and center. Just by nature, she’s not a very argumentative person, which is why we typically never fight now. It just was a topic that we did not discuss. Okay. Yeah. So at least she wasn’t putting pressure on you in this regard. No, it was probably the complete opposite. The only pressure was, “Hey, I’m going to be at church on this day and this time. If you want to hang out with me, that’s where I’ll be.” That was the only pressure. And so it was quite persuasive, apparently. I guess you wanted to be with her, and that was a good thing. Thank you, Robert, for being a part of the Side B Podcast. It’s great to hear your story, and I truly appreciated hearing your journey and your honesty in all of it. So thank you for coming on. Thank you. Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Robert’s story. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, 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 be listening to the other side.

Financial trader Brian Causey questioned his beliefs after 9/11, leading to a search for answers. He discusses his journey from skepticism to faith, grappling with doubts, surrendering to Jesus, and navigating family acceptance in a secular setting. The podcast explores personal transformation, growth from self-centeredness to pursuing truth, and the importance of seeking credible information for intellectual inquiry.

Can the thinking person believe in God? In today’s episode Bruce tells his story of moving from atheism as informed by science to a rational Christian faith that informs both science as well as the most profound questions of life. You can find out more about Bruce through his blog Philosophical Apologist at https://philosophicalapologist.com Episode Transcript Welcome to the podcast, Bruce. It’s so great to have you on the show! Thank you for having me. As we’re getting started, I’d like to get to know you a little bit. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself, your background. I know you have quite an impressive academic background. Why don’t we start there? Okay. Your listeners will probably think, “Wow! This is someone who’s just spent far too much time at university.” To start with, out of high school, one of I guess my first loves, as it were, was mathematics, so out of high school, I did a degree in mathematics and physics and became a high school teacher and taught in high school for a few years, mainly mathematics and physics. This is in Australia. After probably about four or five years of that, I got I guess a little bit bored of teaching the same thing, and I was always interested in computing, so part time, I went back to university and started a degree in computer science and eventually, after a year or so, I grew to like that quite a lot and quit my teaching job and spent a year full time finishing off that computing degree and then got a job in a research center at a university doing programming work. So that was, I guess, the start of my career in computing, which I’ve been doing for many, many years now. I worked for a few years in that, and I was working in another research group in a large private computer company in Brisbane, Australia, and I got the idea of doing a master’s degree by research, so I spent the next year and a half doing a master’s degree in computer science, kind of combining some of the research work I was doing for the company with research for the master’s, and so I did that for a couple of years. Finished that off. Had a long stretch of over a decade without any formal study. Got a bit, sort of itchy feet again, so, “What am I going to study?” And I was always interested, having been a Christian for quite a long time by that point, I was interested in Christian apologetics and had done a lot of reading in that area. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, to be a good Christian apologist, to defend the faith as an apologist, I needed to understand philosophy better, and so, for me, that meant going back to university and doing a degree in philosophy. Which I did from the University of London. I was in Australia at the time, but University of London has a great international program, where you can do degrees by distance, and so I spent five years in total doing my bachelor of arts degree in philosophy through the University of London, Birkbeck, which I really enjoyed. And towards the end of that, I started thinking, “Well, what am I going to do with this?” and I’d met a friend who’s been interviewed on this podcast before, Daniel Rodger his name is, and we’d done a lot of talking about bioethics, and I think he and another friend convinced me that I should go on to do a PhD in bioethics. And that’s what I’m doing now. I’m probably in the last third of my PhD, and that’s at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Wonderful school. My alma mater. Oh is it? Really? Yes, yes. That’s where I received my PhD. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I’ve been on campus. I’m doing that by distance as well. I’m in Australia right now, but I actually started while I was living in London, and I have been to the university campus a number of times now, and it’s a great spot. I really like it there. Well, good, good. You’re in good company with William Lane Craig. Yeah. That’s right. He did his PhD there as well. Right. In philosophy. Or one of his PhDs. Exactly. You’re right about that. So you’re obviously extremely well studied and continue to have obviously an active mind and pursuing really rich and deep truths. Particularly, I’ve noticed that you have quite a resume of academic publications in the area of bioethics, so even though you’re actively in a PhD program, you have published prolifically in that area. I would say quite impressive. So it sounds like you have… You’re currently in Australia, right? That’s right. Yeah. I moved here in December last year from the United Kingdom, where I spent the previous six years. And that is your home, so why don’t we kind of take your life now back towards the beginning? Because we want to understand what your thinking was earlier in your life. Did you grow up in Australia? I did. I was born in Brisbane in Australia and mainly grew up in Australia. Interestingly, though, one of the big influences on my life was actually in the United States. My parents were both atheists or agnostics. They don’t really have any belief in God at all. They’re both scientists. My mother, when I was a child, in primary school, she did a PhD in animal behavior and became a lecturer in animal behavior and quite a well-known one. My father was a physiologist, and he studied reproduction, and he worked for many, many years at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, so I come from quite an academic background, and it’s kind of been a natural thing to go on and do more study myself, just because of the example of my parents. My grandfather was also an academic as well, so yeah, there’s quite a long line in my family from that regard. But my parents didn’t have any belief in God, and growing up, I didn’t either. I naturally took the sort of view that if you can’t prove it with science then it’s not really worth anything. And I guess one of my earlier memories in that regard was… My dad spent a sabbatical year in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States. He was at Washington University there. And I can remember I started a year of school in St. Louis, Missouri, at a school called Brentwood, in a place called Brentwood in St. Louis. And I can remember in the classroom the teacher asking who believed in God and who didn’t, and I was the only person in the class who didn’t believe in God, and they asked me what I believe, and I said, “I believe in science,” so that’s one of my very sort of earlier memories of not being a believer. The culture that you grew up in as well, beyond your family… Was there any reference to Christianity in your culture or among your friends? Or was it- No. Australia is not like the United States. I guess people worship the weather and sport and things like that, so I didn’t set foot in a church in Australia until I was a teenager. I didn’t go to Sunday school. I didn’t do anything in that regard. It was quite easy when I grew up to completely avoid church altogether. It wasn’t something that ever even occurred to me to do or anyone I knew would… No one I knew would go to church. So no. It just wasn’t on the radar. It wasn’t on the radar. And that’s fairly normal for a lot of people in Australia, I think. So, during this time, it just wasn’t a thought for you. It was totally irrelevant. What did you think God and religion and religious people… what was that for you? What did you think it was? It wasn’t really anything at all. I guess unusually I grew up without a television set. My parents were keen on kids wasting their time watching TV, so I didn’t get a television set in the house until I was about 16, so I did a lot of reading, but I was a little bit ignorant in other ways. Any of the more popular TV shows, I didn’t know anything about them. I didn’t really have any, or very little, thoughts about God whatsoever. Probably the only thought I remember as I was a young boy was wondering what happened when I died and thinking of the world without me in it, and I think I found that a bit of a disturbing thought, that I would die and the world would go on as if I’d never existed and no one would really care too much. So that was probably the only thought I remember on those kind of lines. So, as you’re moving along, you found yourself at church one day. It seems like there’s a pathway from not thinking about it at all to being in a church building. What happened between those two things? Well, when I was living in the United States for my dad’s sabbatical year, in the summer holidays, just to keep the kids busy, mom and dad packed us off to a vacation Bible school for a week. And that was my first time I had ever read the Bible, had it taught, and there was something about it that really rang true to me, and I think, from that point… I guess maybe I wasn’t a believer, but from that point, something really resonated with me, and I thought, “This really feels as though it’s kind of true,” and I was pretty young then, but I think in some way, looking back, I think God had His hand on me from that point in particular. Something changed at that point, and when I came back to Australia, I didn’t have any capacity to do anything about it. I didn’t even think about it. But it was a couple of years later, maybe three or four years later, when I started high school, I ended up going… There was a Christian group at school which I got drawn to, I think, a little, but my brother ended up going along to a youth group on Friday nights at a church, and when I got to high school age, I was eligible to go as well, and so, not having much better to do, because there wasn’t really too much to entertain myself with in Brisbane in those days, I went along to youth group on Friday nights. And that was run by a church in Brisbane. I’m curious what your parents thought about that at that time. Obviously, you were a high schooler and a teenager, but knowing that… I guess if you worshiped science in a sense, or your family did, or that was the way of thinking at the time for your family, were they taken aback? Or disconcerted in any way for you going to something like this? No, they weren’t. No. They were quite happy for me to go along. I think they… In their view, it would probably keep me out of trouble as a teenager. And I had a sister who got into a little bit of trouble during those years, the teenage years, and so… yeah. I think they just thought it was a fairly safe place for me to be. I guess safe in some regards, perhaps not in others, in terms of the way that they were thinking. What were you hearing? Or was there something that was drawing you in even as you were at this youth group? I think… As far as the youth group was concerned… I mean, God had His hand on me in a way that I look back and see now, but at the time, it was the most interesting thing going on my life. The guys that were running the youth group were very outdoorsy types, so we would do interesting activities. We would have what they called car rallies, where we’d race around in cars, and we would do rock climbing. We would go on hikes. And the guys who ran that youth group took a real personal interest in the kids that they were looking after. And it wasn’t just the youth group that they ran. They kind of involved a lot of the kids in their lives in other ways as well, so when they went out and did something like go on a hike on a weekend, they would invite us along with them, and so… yeah, we had some really important Christian role models from that point of view who became my friends. So you were developing some meaningful relationships. It was more than just merely a social activity that you attended. you were developing a sense of community and friendships with some people, I guess, that you, like you say, respected in a way, that they were role models. That’s exactly right. That is a really beautiful way, I guess, to show Christianity, in addition to just telling you about it. So what was it about them or their lives that was attractive in a sense, that was something different or other than perhaps what you had experienced outside the Christian community? They were nice guys who really cared, who really, really invested some of their life in the kids in the youth group, including myself. And, even today, that’s not that common a thing, I think. Yeah. We are in such a culture of isolation at the moment, especially with COVID, but yeah, that is something quite wonderful in terms of investing in the other and feeling known and belonging. But I know, again, as a thinking person, that satisfies some kind of existential need in us, that need to know and be known and to belong, and that’s very attractive. What else were you learning about Christianity that was drawing you more towards that? I think I was doing a bit of catch-up in a way. I knew very little about the Bible, didn’t really know the Bible stories or anything like that, and so there was quite a long period there I was just becoming familiar with what was between the covers of the Bible, reading it and being taught it. And I think part of that was people I respected believed it. They lived it. They were very consistent in their Christian faith, and so I could see it at work in their life, and I think, over time, I began to think, “Well, this is probably for me as well.” So what were you finding in the Bible that rang true for you? What was it that was making sense, that you felt like it was something that you wanted to adopt in your life? Was it just the moral principle? Was it something deeper, more spiritual than that? I think it grew into something more spiritual as the years went on. During my teenage years. And I began to see that I could make sense of the world through the story that it was telling, that I could understand now why we were here, that when I died there was actually meaningful life after death as well, and yeah… all the pieces started to fit together in a way, particularly for the questions that I could see science couldn’t answer. It’s often said that science and belief in God are irreconcilable, but obviously you’re a scientist and a Christian, and how were you, at this point in your life, reconciling those two things? Well, I should correct that you that I’m not actually what I’d call a scientist. I did a bachelor of science degree, that’s all. If anything, I’m a philosopher and a software developer, not a scientist, but having grown up with scientists and had a lot to do with science, I guess I do understand the scientific mindset a little. I don’t see any necessary conflict between the two at all. I mean, science is a tool for investigating our world. It operates by certain rules, and using those rules means we discover the natural laws that govern our planet, and we can learn a lot about the life on our planet, but I don’t see that there’s any inherent conflict between science and faith. So that was not as an issue as you were embracing this religious understanding of the world, that it was making sense for you and it was answering some big questions, but they were different kinds of questions than perhaps the mechanics and the how, as compared to the why. Yeah, that’s right. One of the leaders of our youth group was studying science at university and doing an honors project, a research project which I helped him quite a bit in. It was to do with the introduction of exotic fish into local waterways, and I spent a lot of time traipsing around with him, helping him catch fish and things like that, and… Yeah, I couldn’t see any conflict between what I was learning about the Bible and faith with what he was doing as an early budding scientist. And as you were reading more about the Bible and Jesus and what the Bible was saying was ringing true. It was making sense of your life and of the world in the way that you knew it and experienced it. Were you questioning it at all in terms of the historical nature of the Bible? How do I know that these events are true? What about the person of Jesus? Was He a real person in historical time and space? Was the resurrection true? Were you having any of those kinds of questions? I was, but the church I was going to at the time, it’s called the Wesleyan church, which I’m no longer attending a Wesleyan church nowadays. I go to a Baptist church. But in those days, they had a leader who was very much into Christian apologetics, and there was a strong camping movement, so at Easter, the local churches would go away on a youth camp, and we’d have a series of Bible teaching and things like that. And there was quite a bit of apologetics presented to us at the time, so I think, as I grew up as a teenager, it was all presented to me in a way that was not anti-science, that clearly could reconcile science and Christianity, and presented the evidence for the Christian faith. And so that was quite a strong component of what I was taught, and so a lot of the questions I had were answered in that way. They were also quite keen on training people, and so they had a Bible college down in Melbourne, which is quite a fair way south of where I lived. They used to run summer Bible study courses, Bible college courses, and those courses were run by a lecturer in Brisbane, who would present all the material. There was a lot of opportunity for question and answer. And so I used to engage in that quite a lot and get my questions answered or raise new ones and get them discussed. So it was quite an intellectual atmosphere at the time. Certainly a very open atmosphere to ask questions and challenge assumptions and things like that. So I think that was really, really helpful to me. I’m so happy to hear that you had that kind of… especially as a thinking person, a place and a space to study and investigate and ask questions and push back and that you had those who could actually give some good answers and guidance to finding what was true. So as you were moving along and you’re in high school and it’s all making sense, both existentially and intellectually for you, and spiritually, did you come to a place of belief at a certain moment? Or was it a process? Not a particular place and time? Or that you came to see that perhaps the Christian worldview is true, the Bible rings true, that everything seems to come together Yes. It all kind of came together. A friend of mine invited me along, I think when I was about 14 or 15, to I guess an evangelistic crusade meeting, and at that time, he encouraged me to sort of make some kind of Christian commitment, and I felt that that was the right time to do so, and that was, I guess, a moment of decision. It didn’t feel as though it made any difference to me, but I think, from that point onwards, I took a more serious view of Christianity and became more committed to following Christ, and I guess that point, I would say, was my real conversion. And your parents? I’m just curious. As atheist agnostics, how did they accept your Christianity? My parents were always very good about that. They never gave me a hard time. They just accepted that’s what I believed and were never derogatory towards my faith. They didn’t encourage it particularly, but they liked my friends who were Christians. They, I guess, liked that as a teenager I wasn’t out getting drunk or anything like that. I was with a clean crowd, and to them, I guess that was a good thing. Yes. Yeah. They’ve always been quite supportive. Eventually, I started to do a little bit of preaching, and occasionally, they would come along and listen to it, as, I guess, an encouragement to me. So yeah. They never stood in the way at all. That’s great that you’ve had that kind of encouragement from your parents. You obviously have been pursuing Christianity since you were 14, 15 years old. Something like that, yeah. And it’s even influenced the direction of your life, not only in your life, as it were, in your perspectives, in the way you live and the way that you think but also academically even now, how would you say that your view as a Christian, in the Christian worldview, has shaped your life and your trajectory? That’s a good question. Certainly with what I’m doing now, the PhD. My PhD is in the ethics of abortion, and that’s from very much a pro-life perspective. So I’m spending a great deal of time, effort, money in developing defenses that are basically in favor of abortion being immoral, something that shouldn’t be done if at all possible, and so that comes, I think, very much from a Christian perspective. I have been very pro-life for as long as I can remember, but I think my pro-life views came out of my Christian commitment. I don’t remember having any views really one way or another before I became a Christian, but certainly afterwards I saw life as something that’s special, created by God, and it’s important to defend that life from being unjustly ended. That’s wonderful that you’re a champion for life. And also, in terms of your life as a Christian, I imagine, in Australia, you’re moving against the flow of culture. Do you feel the pressure or tension of that? Is it difficult to live as a Christian in a predominantly secularized culture? Well, certainly during COVID times it’s not, because I hardly go out of the house, but a lot of my interaction, being a kind of computer nerd, is online, so I do engage in philosophy groups with atheists quite a bit, and so that’s probably the biggest way I interact with people out there in some ways you are putting yourself on the front line, having discussions online with those who are skeptical about the faith. And you said you’ve moved into really study of Christian apologetics and philosophy. How would you say that your Christian worldview has informed philosophy and your understanding of those bigger questions? Especially even at a secular university where you’re studying. Yeah. Studying philosophy is interesting. Some people find it diminishes their faith. Some people drift away from their faith studying philosophy. Others don’t really have a problem. I’m one of the latter. I’ve found philosophy hasn’t undermined my Christian faith at all, but I think it has taught me to be more critical of some of the arguments Christians put forward, especially in apologetics, and to realize that some arguments are stronger than others and that the apologetics that I had practiced before I started studying philosophy was not as rigorous as it should have been. There were always deeper questions to ask, and sometimes, as Christians, we don’t want to do the intellectual work of formulating arguments properly and deeply and really considering what the other side might think, so philosophy has, I think, taught me to try and be a little bit more evenhanded, to consider objections to things more seriously, to… yeah, try and look at all sides of a question and not solely come at something from, I guess, a Christian point of view but to try and understand what someone opposing that view might think, the reasons they might have for that, and how reasonable those reasons might be. You are obviously a very intelligent, rational person, and oftentimes, Christianity is given the caricaturing that if you’re a thinking person that you shouldn’t be a Christian. Or Christians are uneducated people. But you are a living counter-example to that. Do you feel a sense of that kind of caricaturing of Christians as unthinking, non-thinking, non-rational kind of people? I mean, certainly that caricature’s out there. Being part of, I guess, the worldwide philosophical community, in regular contact with many Christians who are philosophers and some of them, as far as I can see, are much smarter than what I am, and so I think there are intelligent, rational Christians out there. It’s just that, you know, perhaps… Like any faith, there’s people who hold onto it for different reasons, and… Yeah. There’s certainly people out there who don’t want to look at the intellectual questions of faith, and the faith they have might be enough for them. There’s all types of people out there, aren’t there? There sure are. Yeah. In every worldview, it seems like there are those who are more drawn towards really considering their worldview rationally and some are not. I think, too, just from what I know of the United States, is politics and religion tend to get a little bit intertwined there, far more than they do in Australia or the United Kingdom. It’s quite normal for Christians to be on either side of politics in the UK or in Australia. People don’t normally feel too stigmatized by voting on the left side of politics, but in the United States, it seems to be much more polarized, and I think that kind of leads to a bit of caricaturing as well, especially with the whole political scene there at the moment. Oh yes. And so that doesn’t help. No. It sure doesn’t. I really appreciate your just kind of studied, thoughtful sense of Christian faith that not only informs your mind but obviously your life and the way that you approach it, the way that you think about it, and it is just a beautiful example. I think of all of the parts of us coming together. It infuses the entirety of your perspective and your life because ideas have consequences, right? And so you’re a big advocate for things that are ethically good and true and beautiful, like life, and I love to see that. As we’re wrapping up our conversation, Bruce, if someone was, say, a curious skeptic who was listening to the podcast, who didn’t think that Christians could be thoughtful or scientific or intellectual, or they just didn’t think that it was worth considering, do you have a word of advice for someone like that? Well, the internet is a wonderful thing for finding out that that’s not necessarily true. There is no end of resources to go to. My personal favorite, as we’ve mentioned earlier, William Lane Craig has the Reasonable Faith website. He’s got a huge, huge realm of material there, podcasts and articles and things like that that explore a huge range of Christian apologetics, philosophy, so that’s a really good place to start. There’s other philosophers out there and scientists who are worth investigating. The fantastic thing about the internet is that all these people are right at your fingertips. Tim Keller. You search for Tim Keller. Look up some of his podcasts, his books. Some amazing apologetics information there. Who else? There’s no end of guys. John Lennox. John Lennox is a mathematician who does apologetics, a guy, beautiful accent, from northern Ireland, and he’s got some amazing debates and talks you can listen to. So all the resources are out there. Go and check them out. See what you can find. Don’t write Christianity off as anti-intellectual or not wanting to grasp hold of difficult problems, because there are Christians out there doing that hard work right now. Those are excellent resources, and I’ll include those in our episode notes, just some websites and things to connect with those resources. And finally, if you could speak to Christians in terms of how they approach their faith or what you might encourage them to do in terms of strengthening their faith or their apologetic for the Christian worldview, how would you encourage them? I’d encourage them to do so in a similar way, to start finding out the resources that are out there, start thinking of… If there’s any questions they have unresolved, like the question of suffering, which is probably the most difficult question out there, start listening to these guys. Listen to Tim Keller’s talk on suffering and how different cultures, different worldviews, approach suffering and other resources out there. The answers are there, and people have sorted through these things, and it’s really important to educate yourself on these things, not only for you but for particularly the young people in the church, people in their teens and going through university. Apologetics isn’t that big a thing in churches, and young people are, almost at an unprecedented rate, leaving the faith as they go to university and shortly afterwards. They need these questions answered, and there need to be people in the church who are willing to work with them to find those answers, and so, for anyone who’s not a teenager, who’s a little bit older, think about learning a bit of apologetics, coming to grips with these questions, not only for your own sake but for the sake of the young people in the church. And if you have children of your own, you’re going to be wanting to teach those children about these answers. Absolutely. If you could… For those who aren’t familiar with the term apologetics, and there are those who call themselves Christians who really have no idea what apologetics is, can you describe what that word means? It sounds like it’s apologizing for the faith, but it’s not really. It really means defending your faith, as the Apostle Peter meant. Having an answer for people who ask you about your faith. If someone says, “Well, why do you believe?” what kind of answer are you going to give them? That’s probably the very first thing. If you think, “Wow, if someone asks me that, what am I going to say? Why am I a Christian? Why do I hold onto this? Why is it important to me?” And we need to have answers to those kind of questions when people ask us. And that’s what apologetics is, having a reason for the faith that you have. Very, very good. As we’re ending, Bruce, I just appreciate all that you have brought to this podcast today. Is there anything else that you’d like to add before we close? Any other thoughts? Sure. There is. Christianity isn’t just an intellectual thing to me. Satisfying the intellect is extremely important, but it’s also important not to let the intellect take away from your own relationship with God, and I know, for me, that’s always a temptation, to spend too much time studying about God and the reasons for God, without encountering God Himself, and so that’s an important thing not to lose hold of. Nowadays, I identify with a charismatic tradition. I think God does miracles now. I’ve seen God do some amazing healings. I’ve seen some amazing prophecies, and… Yeah, God is not just a God of the textbook or a God of the rational mind. He is active in the world today, and He’s out there, and we can encounter Him. That’s a great word. Thank you for that. And thank you for your time, again, Bruce, in coming on and from all the way across the world, in Australia, but you’re as clear as day. And I so appreciate, again, your spending your time with us. So thank you again. Thank you very much. I enjoyed talking to you. Wonderful.

Former skeptic Ashley declared herself an atheist as a young woman. Dissatisfied with atheistic nihilism, she turned to psychedelics and mysticism in her search for something more. Her longing eventually led her to reconsider God. Ashley Lande‘s blog: www.ashleylande.com Episode Transcript Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Ashley. It’s so great to have you! Thank you. I’m so very glad to be here. As we’re getting started, before you tell your story, I would love to know, and I would love the listeners to know, a bit about there. It seems like you have a lot going on in your life that you love and the things that you love to do, and I’d love to hear about that now. Okay, sure. I’m an artist and a writer. I live with my husband and two children, a boy and a girl, in a little town near the Flint Hills of Kansas, and I home-school my two children, and my husband works on a wind farm. And we have chickens. That’s something I really enjoy. And I have a website displaying my art and a blog on it as well at www.ashleylande.com. Yeah. And that’s what I do. It sounds like a really intriguing, almost idyllic, place to live these days, outside of the city in the rural country. Wow. Living somewhat of a simple existence. It sounds very wonderful in a way. That you have that space. And chickens! That’s very interesting. So I presume that you collect eggs, and you probably grow a lot of vegetables and do all that kind of thing with regard to sustainability and living. That’s terrific! We do love the chickens. I have yet to master gardening, but one day. Someday. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Me, too. I tried my hand a little bit at gardening, but just a few flowers here and there. Yeah. [1:55 But I understand, from your story, that it’s a little bit different than many of the stories that we’ve heard so far, that many start with… Okay. Ashley, I’m going to start that over again. Mark, X that out. Okay. Okay. All right. Okay. So, Ashley, as we’re getting to know you and your story, let’s start back at the beginning. Tell me about where you grew up. Did you grow up in Kansas? Is that where your home is? And what was that like? Your family, your friends, your community. Was God anywhere in the picture? Yes. So I actually grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, on the Missouri side. Us Missourians are very emphatic about that. The bulk of Kansas City is actually on the Missouri side, and I grew up in a suburb called Blue Springs that was about 20 miles from the city. I grew up kind of in a unique situation. We were in a suburb, and we were in the city limits, but my dad had… He was from southern California, and he met my mom, who lived in the Midwest, and decided to move back here with her because he could own land, whereas in southern California, near the coast, that’s an impossibility unless you’re a millionaire. So he bought the land and was actually grandfathered into the animal ordinance, so we had all kinds of animals. We had horses, and we had a cow at one point. We had a llama. Chickens and ducks and kind of tucked back in the woods, even though we were in a suburb, so my childhood was wonderful in many ways. I had a sister. She was about 2-1/2 years older than me. She passed away in 2017, but I grew up with her. And faith was—it was kind of a peripheral part of our lives in that season. We went to church—usually two or three times a month we’d go to church on Sundays, and I remember going to vacation Bible school and Sunday school, and my dad was very busy with his business. He was a commercial interior designer, and he built his own business, had a business in Kansas City, so he commuted every day. He was very busy with that, very consumed with that, and he was also very strong in his political identity, and so the church we went to was a Methodist Church, which was the tradition that my mother had grown up in, but for my dad, the Methodist Church was too quote-unquote liberal, and so he kind of phased in and out of going to church. Bible reading was not necessarily a big part of our lives. Faith just seemed like something that we participated in on Sundays. And I don’t say that to criticize my parents. They were doing the best they could. They both grew up in highly dysfunctional families. I do remember having conversations with my dad about infinity and the nature of God in a very abstract way, and I just remember trying to contemplate infinity, and it was so mystifying to me that I just could not wrap my head around the idea of infinity. But I remember Jesus was just kind of represented in my mind as kind of a gentle, passive figure, and I know I must’ve heard the gospel at some point. I remember singing Jesus Loves You in Sunday school, but somehow it never really sunk in. And around the time I was, just getting into trouble at school and with the police here and there, and so that was a, and church attendance kind of dropped off at that point. My sister had started refusing to go, and my dad didn’t go very much, so I thought, like, “Well, why should I go? Why should I have to go?” Because it. It didn’t seem substantive. And around that time, I was probably, I don’t know, 14, I remember very reluctantly going to church camp with one of my best friends, and I just realized at that church camp, “I don’t believe any of this.” And I knew—sorry, I’m kind of just jumping into the story. No, that’s great! Yeah. And so that was my family background. So there was some foundation, but it just didn’t—I don’t know. Yeah. So it was a really—as a child, at least, there wasn’t a sense in which you took hold of that in a personal way. It wasn’t like you had belief or felt belief, it was just some ritual that you did, some activity on Sunday, but it’s something you never really truly believed. Right, right. Exactly. So you wouldn’t have considered yourself really a Christian at any point in your life really prior, at least in your preteen days before you stopped going. No, no, I wouldn’t have. I think I took the existence of God as kind of a given, and I remember I had a half brother. I have a half brother who’s quite a bit older than me. He is 15 years older than me, and so I didn’t grow up with him really, but we would see him fairly often, at least once or twice a year, and I remember when I was probably 9 or 10 and we were riding with him… We were visiting him in California, and my sister and I were riding with him in his car, and this song came on the radio called, “Dear God” by a British pop band called XTC, and the lyrics were all about, “Dear God, I can’t believe in you. I won’t believe in you,” and it was just describing this man’s… all his grievances against God and how he would not believe in him. And I just remember being scandalized, thinking, “I didn’t know people were allowed to not believe in God,” so it’s interesting. On one hand, I wouldn’t say I had any kind of personal encounter with Jesus Christ. I’m always a little envious of people who say that they had moments in their childhood where they felt God’s presence really strongly because I don’t remember ever having that. Yet, at the same time, I feel like there was. So yeah. Yeah, so that moment in the car, when you were 9 or 10, that actually opened the door to the possibility that perhaps that isn’t an assumption for everyone and that it gave you the freedom, I suppose, when you are at that church camp, to say, “No, I really don’t believe any of this.” Yes. And that possibility felt dangerous, certainly, but it also was exotic and a little enticing, and yeah, and then at that church camp, I just realized—and I remember I was bold enough at that point, I guess, to announce my atheism. We were having this little gathering around a campfire and sitting on those benches that are made of half of a log, and I said I just didn’t believe, and there was just dead silence. And one of the counselors took me aside afterward and encouraged me to read the work of C.S. Lewis, and he said I should start with the Chronicles of Narnia, and I kind of just said, “Oh, okay. Yeah. I’ll look into that.” I didn’t at the time, but I remember being really confused because I remember watching a cartoon version, an animated version of the Chronicles of Narnia when I was a child, but I literally had no idea, until I was an adult, actually, that Aslan was supposed to represent Jesus. It just went completely over my head. And so that really made me stop and think, “Oh!” And even at that point, I don’t think I realized until I was an adult, so yeah, I did have some influences like that, but I don’t know. They just never took hold. It just intuitively seemed not worthy of belief. That is, it’s not as if you went on this intellectual journey and said, “Oh, Christianity isn’t worth believing.” It was just like it just didn’t feel like something that was worth believing in. Was it, do you think, more intellectual at that time? I mean, I know you were a preteen or you were an early teenager, 13 and 14, but at that time, was it just, “Man, it just seems like…” What did you think Christianity was if it wasn’t true? You know, I look back now, and I can see that I was just out-of-hand dismissive of it and also around that time, I started—I’ve always loved to read, and around that time, I started reading some very adult things that were very… like existentialist, nihilistic, just about the absurdity of life. I read The Plague and The Stranger by Albert Camus, and one of my favorite books around that time was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which is kind of all about the absurdity of war and, by extension, the absurdity of life and the futility of life, and I started reading the Beat Poets, like Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso was someone I was really into, so I was introducing myself, I guess, to these really cerebral writers, and I was attracted to that, that intellectualism. I was very attracted to that, and I had never been introduced to any kind of intellectually robust Christianity. I didn’t take that guy’s recommendation to read any C.S. Lewis, and I just didn’t even know it existed. So I think I just dismissed Christianity out of hand as something that was shallow. It was delusional. It was for… just all the stereotypical… you know, it was for weak people, weak-minded people. It was for stupid people. Yeah, yeah, so I think there was that seduction, I guess, by those existentialist, kind of nihilistic writers going on at the same time. Well, that’s curious. Especially, again, for someone in your teens to be delving into substantive writers like that. I wonder, when you were reading this existential material, or these novels or writings, did you believe that nihilistic worldview? And if so, also, did you embrace that kind of outlook on life? Did it affect your life in any way? Yeah. And I think I thought I did. Looking back, I can see I had such a shallowness of experience, being, you know, 14, 15, 16 years old. Ashley? Mark, obviously, there’s a pause here. It looks like she’s offline. Okay, there you are!] Okay. I’m sorry. I moved myself into the other room, closer to the WIFI router. Okay, good, good. So hopefully, this will go better. I’m sorry about that.] No! No problem. I don’t know if you heard my question. I was asking whether or not reading this existential material caused you to believe in nihilism and existentialism. Did it affect your life in any way? Yes. I think at the time I would’ve said that. I just thought, to me, they seemed, which now it just seems so bizarre to me. But yeah. I mean, and I think that certainly had an effect, that I was reading all those things and embracing all that kind of thinking, but I think, as far as thinking through the logical consequences of there being no meaning to life, I think I didn’t think that far. So I presume that you, with this kind of outlook, I would imagine that you created whatever life that you wanted to create? Because life was nothing but this reductionistic understanding of making your own reality? I presume that probably gave you a lot of freedom, but I wondered how long did you embrace this kind of philosophy or go along this pathway? Yeah. I think… Gosh, for quite some time. And looking back, I can see there was a lot of emotional pain over the… Those years were very chaotic in my family because of everything that my sister was going through, and so I think that probably also some of it was a little bit reactionary to what was happening with her, and also, I had always felt like a rule follower up to that point. I always got good grades. I never did anything dangerous or risky, and so I guess, and of course I was, at that time, too, listening to the… I would have been that it can be casually enjoyed, and I think I went along with that and drinking, too, in college. In college, I really kind of crashed and burned as far as the drinking went. I recovered a little, though, and I was able to finish college, but I would say into, I very much embraced, I guess, a kind of even if I didn’t necessarily follow it all the way to its logical consequences or its logical outcome. During any of this time, did the issue of God ever come up? Did you ever reconsider that at all as even a possibility? Did you run into any Christians? Were there any influences like that in your world through any of this? Yeah. I remember, in college, I really. I was drinking a lot, and I had actually known a young man who… There was a summer in college, I think it was between my sophomore and junior year, and I had known a young man who was in an illicit relationship and had gotten murdered, actually, by the man that he was involved with. And it was just such a dark, dark time, and I was having and I remember I started going to an actually, and I only lasted for, gosh, probably less than a week, but sitting there and listening to people, these people who… most of them were a generation older than me and had completely hit rock bottom in their lives, and just listening to them talk about, and of course, AA is not necessarily a Christian organization, but there are, and so that, for sure, even though I kind of wussed out after a little while. And I remember, too, around that time, going to a church. There was one Sunday morning. I’m sure I was hung over, and I just was so miserable and so I remember I went to a Methodist Church service, and I went inside and I sat down, and shortly after, the pastor just kind of greeted everyone, then, he invited everyone to greet one another, and I remember there was. I was just filled with shame. I think because I just and I actually… as soon as the greeting time was over, I fled. I just ran out. And so there were moments where I look back and think, “Wow! If I had just surrendered to what I think God was trying to do at that point, that would’ve made my life so much easier,” but I did not at that time. So you continued on. I guess you said you were in young adulthood at this point, and you were still, I presume, moving along in this way of living and thinking and perhaps difficulties in life and a little bit of despair. I presume at that point you would have considered—you mentioned that your worldview at that time really gave you no help, no savior, no recourse. So that was a situation or a circumstance or moment in your life where you actually were forced, in a way, to look at the implications of your own nihilistic worldview, that there was nothing there for you. It didn’t offer, perhaps, what you needed or what you were looking for. So even though you weren’t, I guess earlier, looking at the logical implications, in some ways, existentially, your existentialism kind of came to roost and to show its true self and your point of need. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah. Which they inevitably do, don’t they? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That our ways of thinking have a way of finding us in our lives. So tell me then what happened next in your journey? So I, and I lived with my parents for a few months, and then I got a job and was out on my own. And I remember I felt—and I can’t remember if there was something that triggered this. I don’t remember having an encounter with a Christian. Maybe it was just my own discussions with my dad. And I would, and so at one point—I think I was 23—I decided, “Gosh, I really need to be able to rationally argue this. If this is what I believe, I need to be able to prove it,” and it’s interesting. For me, it was never even a matter of, “Oh, maybe I should investigate the other side.” I just dismissed that out of hand. I was like, “No, I need to read atheist authors and be able to prove my worldview.” And so I remember I read Richard Dawkins. I think The Blind Watchmaker was the one I read. And a lot of the science just went over my head, but I trusted it. I trusted he knew what he was talking about. And I believed all his conclusions. And then someone loaned me, I think, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris and that—he was a little smug, and that kind of got under my skin, but I guess I agreed with everything he was saying. And then I also really liked Christopher Hitchens. He was, of course, one of the big New Atheists at the time, and I really liked him, just thought he was so clever and so smart, and so he had a book coming out around that time called God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and so I remember getting that book and thinking, like, “This is going to be the key. This book is going to really codify this belief system for me, and I’m going to be able to indisputably shut down anyone that I encounter.” And I remember lying on my bed in my apartment reading it, and I read about half of it, and I just had this cold, hollow, empty feeling, and I distinctly remember throwing the book down on the floor, and eventually it got kicked under my bed, but I just felt like, Because there was this very hard certainty in his writing and in the New Atheist writing, and it just felt like… And that was really a cracking point for me, thinking, “I don’t know if I can abide in this worldview.” But I still… At that point, but around that time, too, I guess I was just, and I had taken psychedelic mushrooms before in college, and it was just a fun time. It was just kind of a party. And I had a friend later on, at this time that I was reading Christopher Hitchens, I had a friend who had some, and he asked me if I wanted to do it. I said, “Sure. Why not?” And I had a really—and I just want to be very clear before I go into talking about this that I do not condone drug use whatsoever, which will become clear as I keep talking. But I had And it’s been difficult for me to reconcile. And then after that, so it’s been kind of difficult. I’ve asked God to help me reconcile these experiences, because you can, And so this experience I had, I certainly think, in time, God has used it for good, because He uses all things for good in those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, of course. But it really shattered my materialist atheist worldview. I just thought, “I can’t believe that anymore.” But I still—and I feel like I became spiritually open to anything except Jesus. Yeah. I was open to anything! And I had friends who were just complete stoners and would talk about dolphins being from outer space, and I was open to anything except Jesus. I was still so closed off to Jesus, which I look back and think, “That’s just extraordinary how Satan can blind you.” But yeah. And I, so sometime after this. And I was very into psychedelic drugs. He was very into psychedelic drugs. And we fell in love very, very fast, very hard, and we got. So it was very fast, very intense. And around that time, with him, I would have some psychedelic experiences that seemed very transcendent and seemed very spiritual and then I had some that were utterly, utterly terrifying and actually traumatizing, but I just hung on because I felt, for me, this was the only way that I had ever experienced something transcendent or even something demonic, something that was outside of my realm of experience to that point. So I was very immersed in that whole world for years. And like I said, I was open to anything spiritually. I was very, very into yoga as well. I practiced yoga almost every day. Was very devoted to yogic philosophy, which, in America, yogic philosophy, it’s just kind of a mishmash of… oh, gosh. It’s just kind of a grab bag of Eastern religions, but I was very devoted to yoga as a spiritual practice. I would say, at that point, it was my religion, along with psychedelics. So yeah. So it sounds like that was an amazing period of your life, extraordinary, and what I mean by that is that what I appreciate about that part of your story is that it seems to me that sometimes, when those who are atheists encounter something supernatural or beyond the natural, they don’t necessarily really appreciate the reality of that supernatural reality. I know that sounds redundant, but it’s something that there, but it doesn’t cohere with a naturalistic, materialistic worldview that says matter and physicality is all there is. But you, at least, you were willing to—like you say, you were open to more. Especially after that shattering experience. That you did realize that there was something beyond just this physicality. Beyond what the existentialists and the atheists were saying, that this world is all there is, so in a way, I applaud you for that, but it sounded like you embraced it fully. I mean, like, really fully! Yeah. For several years. Because it was obviously giving you something beyond what you had had before. Yes. Like you say, it’s almost as if that dangerous kind of life that you had chosen in your teens, then it almost accelerated in another place of your life. It was exhilarating. It was exciting. It was dangerous also. Yeah. In your young adulthood. But you were looking… It sounds like you were looking for something. Yes. Yeah. I definitely was. I absolutely was. And I think… I look back, and the philosophies I embraced were very much self-salvation philosophies. They were enlightenment, practices that supposedly would lead to enlightenment. I remember, just in the New Age circles in which I ran, there were so many platitudes that would just be thrown out, like people would always be saying “love and light, love and light,” and I remember there was the idea that we are god collectively, like, “We are god, and I am god.” That was a big thing that I entertained for a while, and I remember one night just thinking about that and thinking, like, “Oh, my gosh! If we are god, that means we’re all alone!” And it really struck me, and it was a really terrifying thought. Like, “We are all alone. If there is nothing supernatural, if we collectively are god, and there’s no transcendent being, that’s terrifying.” And so there were definitely times where, if I actually carefully thought about what I was embracing, I feel like there were holes. There were cracks that would emerge and things that didn’t add up and things that didn’t make sense. And I remember I got to a point where I could not have a good trip anymore on psychedelics. Immediately and I decided that,  and I thought, “Oh, if I can just put the right energy into them. I can speak the right words over them, and I can cultivate them lovingly. I will have a good trip. The problem is the source,” you know the source where I’m getting these things. And so I remember I grew them, and I would check on them religiously, and I would—whatever kind of—I don’t know—like Sanskrit patois I would know at that point from my yoga classes I would speak over them. And so one night, my husband and I, we blended them with orange juice, and we drank it, and I remember… I had a horrible time. And just feeling like I was and my husband, he’s a very steady person, and he said, “Of course, everything has meaning.” But I just felt like… And we had our. That was a difficult experience. I think I just wasn’t prepared for it. Learning how selfish I was with a newborn, and I had some pretty significant postpartum, and so that was difficult working through, but then we got to a place where our son was, when he was an older infant, things just felt really wonderful, really steady as a family and our family life, and around that time… Let’s see. I’m trying to remember what happened first. I think when my son was 15 months old—we were not planning on having—at least my plan was not to have another child because I said, “I am not doing that again.” And of course I loved my son intensely, but I said, “I just can’t ever do that again.” And surprise! I got pregnant. And I just was so upset. My husband started smoking again. He hadn’t smoked in a year, I think. And he’s since quit again. Thankfully. Thank God. But it was very stressful. And we were very hand to mouth. This was when we were still living in Kansas City. We were very hand to mouth, and I remember I was just so upset. And I think at one point my husband even said, like, “Well, we can’t get an abortion.” And I said, “Oh, no, no, no, no,” so even though, with my belief system then, I still was like, “No, no, no, no. I could never do that.” But I just felt despair. And around that same time, just a few weeks after I had learned I was pregnant, one of my childhood friends who was a devout Christian—I should have mentioned her before. Periodically over the years, well since my son was born, I had lived about 30 minutes away from me, but periodically, I would go, and I think Steven and I, my husband and I, and Izzy went over there for dinner one evening, and it was interesting. She would always… I would blather about whatever New Age thing I was currently into, and she would always…And looking back, I can see and anyway, after I discovered I was pregnant for the second time, with our daughter, Carrie, and at first they couldn’t figure out what it was. She was just really lethargic and had bleeding in her mouth, and it turned out it was leukemia. And so one of her friends sent out an email, had organized a meal train for Carrie and her family, and so you could sign up to bring a meal, and I signed up for a date that was, I think, a few weeks out, and then I remembered… a couple of days before I was scheduled to take her a meal, I got an email from the same woman, a friend of hers, saying, “Joella’s service will be on such and such a day at this church,” and I thought, “Service? What is she talking about?” And She had lived for three weeks after she had been hospitalized, and oh! It was just so… It was so heartbreaking and so devastating, and I remember… I look back and see this as really a turning point for me, because Here I am pregnant with a baby I don’t want and then my friend, who’s very devoted to this Jesus guy, is losing her child, and she’s such a good person. And so we went to Joella’s funeral, and it was just heartbreaking. It was so heartbreaking. And I was sobbing, and my friend came up to me, and she and her husband just had a peace about them that just did not make any sense. It was so baffling to me. I kept thinking, like, “If my son died, I would jump off a cliff. How can they have this?” And of course they were grieving and mourning, but they just had this peace that was just befuddling to me. And I remember that really started me wondering. And a few months after that, she and I had emailed back and forth here and there, and she told me that a hymn that had really been sustaining her and her husband was and she shared with me the story of the man who wrote that, who, of course, lost his entire family at sea, with the exception of his wife, I believe. And I put that song on a playlist on Spotify, and one day, it was springtime, and my children and I were out on our front porch, and I put that playlist on, and “It is Well with My Soul” came on. And it’s interesting because, up to that point, you know, the music was just background music. I wasn’t actually listening to it, but when that song came on, I feel like the Holy Spirit just grabbed me and made me listen. And tears just started pouring down my face, and I realized… Sorry, I still get emotional about it. I understood what Jesus did for me, and I understood… I feel like I had really just come to my breaking point of feeling like none of these self-salvation things work. I cannot make myself any better of a person by going to yoga three times a week. I cannot make myself any better of a person by meditating. I can’t make myself any better… I had an icon of the goddess Kali, and, like, I can’t make myself any better of a person through any of this. And I had just really come to a breaking point. The verse that I always think of is Paul, in I think it’s Romans 8, he said, “Oh, wretched man that I am. Yes. Yeah. And I just… And that night, when my husband got home from work, I said, “We need to throw away all of this.” We had a little Ganesh icon, which is a Hindu elephant god. We had a little Buddha icon. And we had all kinds of New Age books and drug books and certainly the icon of the goddess Kali, I was like, “This all needs to go,” and he, at that time, had actually been really interested in Orthodox Christianity and the early church, and I was very, very resistant to it. I was like, “I don’t want anything to do with Jesus. I don’t care. I don’t want anything to do with that,” and so when he got home and I said that, he said, “Yes, you’re right. This all needs to go.” And so we just filled up a trash bag, and we talked about it, and I think neither of us fully understood everything. We still had a lot of questions. Well I should say another thing that was happening at that time—it was just an intersection of so many things that God orchestrated. Which was just down the street from us, just a few blocks down, and I had said, “No, I’m not interested. I’m not going to a church,” and so he would go by himself, and he would take our son, and so I went a few times. I agreed finally to go with him, I think, when I was eight months’ pregnant with our daughter, and I remember, but I just remember sobbing, and we sat near the back in a pew, and I just remember sobbing during the worship segment, just sobbing, and so all these things together, I just began to think, “Okay, maybe there’s a lot more to this Jesus person than I ever dreamed or imagined.” Yeah. So you actually did start going to church, and you became open to who this person of Jesus was. Yes. And what did you find out? So I feel so blessed. It was a really wonderful church community, and they were really nonreactionary when it came to some of the things that I would say or some of the questions that I would ask people. They were just a very gentle, loving, Christlike community. And I think it was—initially for me it was definitely an emotional surrender to my need for a Savior, to the person of Jesus Christ. I just felt so emotionally drawn to Him. And then I feel like the intellectual confirmation kind of came afterwards and came slowly. I started reading the Bible, first of all, which was difficult at first. I just felt like there was a lot I didn’t understand. Despite my having something of a childhood foundation in Christianity, I just had no knowledge at all. I didn’t know who Paul was. I felt like I was starting over completely because I felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes, whereas I felt like before I was just blinded. Nothing got in. Nothing penetrated my heart or my soul. And this time it was just fascinating to read what was actually in the Bible. This book that I had just dismissed out of hand as anti-intellectual and regressive my whole life, to read what was actually in there and to read the words of Jesus and just feel so pierced by them. And just so fascinated by Him. He’s so fascinating. Endlessly fascinating. So yeah. Just for those who are listening. To understand what you mean by emotional surrender to Jesus, you spoke of the self-salvation philosophies, but somehow when you say you surrender to Jesus, I presume you mean that in a sense of salvation or saving. Yes. What would that look like for someone who really doesn’t understand what you mean by that? Okay, yeah. Let me think about that. I think I realized how miserable and wretched I was. I realized that I was desperate and I needed forgiveness and I wasn’t a wonderful person and I wasn’t full of love and light, like all the New Age platitudes said. I wasn’t completely whole already. That was a big thing, too, in New Age, that you’re already whole and you’re already complete, and you just need to realize it. You just need to be enlightened, and so I think I surrendered to my own sinfulness and my own wretchedness, and in that, discovered how desperately I needed and wanted a savior. And also I think, like I said, that point on the porch of understanding what Jesus did for me and understanding why it had to be that way and why it was necessary and just being so overwhelmed with… Gratitude seems like an inadequate word for what Jesus did for us. But it’s the only word I can think of at the moment. But just being overwhelmed with gratitude and love, and like I said, just being pierced by the idea of Him being pierced for me. It was just so… The magnitude of it was so overwhelming, so overwhelming. So all of the, I guess, again, just in very simple terms, then that all of the inadequacy and the lack you felt in yourself, He, Jesus took on for you? Yes. You know, you said He was pierced for you. I presume you mean a reference to the cross on which He died so that all of those inadequacies and the lack of wholeness and the dirtiness you felt and all of that, He took all of that on Himself, and then He gives you His forgiveness and His righteousness in exchange, is that- Yeah, absolutely. Is that what you mean by that? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So it was something, coming to the end of yourself and saying, “I can’t, but You can.” Yeah. “I cannot do this for myself, but what You’ve done for me is what makes me whole,” I guess and clean and forgiven and given life in exchange. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead. Yeah. Even understanding the fullness. I feel like I had an emotional understanding at that point of what He did for me, but understanding the fullness of salvation and exactly what He did for me and that He made me completely clean and that He gave me eternal life and that… yeah, and that He clothes me with his righteousness and my life is hid with Christ in God. That’s a verse I love, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately. I’m completely safe in Him forever because of what He did. And just the reality of… I think, at the beginning, my husband and I both kind of tried to… My husband was ahead of me at that time, you know? As far as his interest in Christianity, but we both kind of tried to come at it impersonally, like this is yet another belief system that we are going to sample and try out and see what works for us and see what doesn’t. And I think there was also a profound moment for me of realizing this isn’t just another in my grab bag of philosophies and religions and belief systems. This is the ground of reality. And this makes a claim on me. Christianity is not subject to me. I am subject to Jesus, and what Jesus did demands a response. I have to decide. And that was really a profound moment and humbling moment for me as well. Yes. To make the statement that this is the ground of all reality, that Jesus is the ground, that’s a pretty profound philosophical statement about what is true about what we know and what we experience in the world, as well as in ourselves. And that is also quite an intellectual statement. So I’m presuming from what you’re saying there that you read the Bible, you understood more as the scales fell off, and you understood the grandness of the narrative and that it really is something so much bigger than you and that you are not God, right? Yeah. There is a God, and it’s not you. Right. But that there’s a grand narrative to reality. I wonder did you ground this understanding that Jesus Christ and God are the ground of all reality, did you get that only through reading the Bible? Or just as you read those intellectual atheists and other books, did you read any apologetics or anything that helped you form this understanding of the grandness of this worldview? Yeah, for sure, and I think I probably heard that in a sermon at some point. And I really would tie it to the beginning of the Gospel of John, like, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. The Word was God. Through Him, all things were made,” and I think there’s also a verse in Colossians that’s one of my favorites, and I’m probably going to be paraphrasing here. I should just memorize it. But I’ll say the clause in the middle of the sentence. He’s talking about Jesus, of course, and he says, “in whom all the treasures and mysteries of knowledge are hidden,” and I remember that really striking me, like, “Wow! Jesus is it!” And things that were really… I’m trying to think of what was really seminal for me. Certainly just reading the Bible was a big deal to me. Also Timothy Keller is someone that I really love, and he does some apologetics, and so I think reading him and realizing, “Oh, I always thought my atheist mindset was just kind of the default mindset,” and realizing, “Oh, I’ve actually been formed in such a way that this is how I think.” Oh, and another author that I really love and one of his books was huge for me, Lesslie Newbigin. He was a missiologist and a theologian, and he was a missionary in India for many years, so he was very acquainted with Eastern ways of thinking, with Eastern religions, Eastern mysticism, so it was really invigorating for me to read his work, and one of his books, called Proper Confidence, was really huge for me. He just talks a lot about how every worldview is based in faith. Like the scientific worldview is based in faith because it’s based upon this foundation that the world is knowable. It’s based upon centuries of scientific exploration and assuming that we’re looking at the right places and we’re asking the right questions, so that is very much an article of faith. And so that really helped me to understand these ways of thinking that I had thought were just rational ways of thinking were also, in fact, articles of faith. So that was really big for me. Right. So it sounds as if, Ashley, that you have—even by the language that you’re using and the things that you’re saying, that you have encountered a tremendous life change associated with your conversion to Jesus. Can you tell us about how your life has changed? I mean, you’ve been through a lot in your life, and you went through a lot of, not only difficult circumstances but a lot of despair and lack of meaning and that was your biggest fear, right? That nothing had meaning. So how would you say that your life has changed, especially with regard to those big questions of meaning and purpose and truth and knowledge and those things? Oh, I mean profoundly. Night and day. I can look back and see that didn’t have hope before. Like I said when I was younger and I would have a crisis, there was no recourse. There was no help. And I have hope now. And I know that Jesus never leaves me. He never forsakes me. He promised. And I went through a really difficult period of loss several years ago. My sister and my dad both died within eight months of each other, and I look back and think—and my sister’s death was very sudden and unexpected. And I just clung to Jesus. And I remember thinking… I remember talking with my mom afterward, when the smoke had cleared a little, because of course my mom was going through all this profound loss as well, and we have talked a lot about it since, but I said, “Can you imagine if this had happened before I was a believer,” and she said, “Oh, I have thanked God in prayer that you were a believer,” because I don’t know what I would’ve done. I don’t know how I would have grappled with death. Like I said, that’s why, when I was young, I don’t think I actually thought things through to their logical conclusion, because if asked, I would have said, “Oh, death is the end. There’s nothing beyond that. I don’t care.” I would have had a very laissez-faire attitude about it, but I can’t imagine losing someone I love and genuinely holding to that belief. So my faith in Jesus gave me so much hope during that time, and I felt His presence so closely, and actually have some really beautiful testimonies from that time, but that’s another story. But yeah, I have hope. And I can see now, too, that God has enabled me to truly love people. Not perfectly, obviously, but That’s really beautiful. That’s really, really beautiful. As we’re coming to a close here and just thinking about all of those who are listening, who may have pushed away God just like you, thinking it was just not intellectually tenable, for whatever reason, emotionally or intellectually, what would you say to someone who may have found that moment of openness like you did, like perhaps there’s more. What would you say to someone like that, who might be actually looking or open? Yeah. I would say listen to that. It’s really scary to step into that. I think I had so much resistance. And I was scared. I mean, I think sometimes we need to have a fearful experience of God. Like Hebrews said, it’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It’s also a very wonderful thing. But there was and I would say also examine your assumptions because I think a lot of what people think are default modes of thinking or are just rational modes of thinking have, in fact, been shaped by their education, by their life circumstances. So yeah. But I would say… it would be hard for me just to not say, like, “Please. Jesus is so wonderful! Believe me,” and grab someone by the lapels. I don’t do that in real life, but sometimes I feel like it. But yeah, yeah. I think that’s what I would say. Yeah. Jesus is so wonderful! Give Him a chance, right? Yes. Give Him a chance. Just really consider it. Yes. Especially, like you said… I’ve spoken with a lot of people who actually, as you did, started reading the Bible for the first time and were just overwhelmed with the person of Jesus that they actually found in scripture. It wasn’t a caricaturing of who they thought He was. It was actually the profound love and authority and compassion and the strength and just so many things that are hard to put words on. Yeah. But actually looking into it and reading it for yourself and reading about the person of Jesus and actually seeing Him for Who He reveals Himself to be is worth it. Yeah. So now, on the other side of things, as a Christian, you’re obviously passionate about your faith. You obviously want other people to believe. Sometimes, we as Christians… I’m impressed with your friend, Carrie, and how she painted an embodied picture of Christianity that was so enticing and filled with peace, even at her daughter’s passing. Being selfless at that moment where she should have been the one receiving. I mean, those are really amazing ways of seeing an embodied Christianity, which oftentimes people don’t see or experience. But I appreciate your bringing her into your story. I wonder if her influence on you has anything to do with what you would tell Christians in terms of how we can best demonstrate Christ and engage with those who really don’t know how wonderful Jesus is. Yes, yeah, I absolutely think so, and like I said, she has just such about her, anyway, but I think… just how she would. She would not be reactionary, but she would So yeah, that made a huge impression on me obviously. She was really instrumental in me becoming a Christian. So yeah. Yeah. What a beautiful example. We can all learn from Carrie. So thank you, Carrie. Yes. Thank you so much, Ashley, for telling your story today. It has so many twists and turns and in unexpected ways. I appreciate your transparency and your boldness, your vulnerability in the way that you actually portrayed your life in an extremely vulnerable way. Yeah. I so deeply appreciate being given the chance to speak about it and to speak about Jesus and how He’s changed my life. I really appreciate it. Wonderful! I do hope that many people listening to this will come to find out more, not only about Jesus but about you, and go to your website and see the beautiful art and artist that you are and your wonderful writings and blogs and just learn more about your chickens. Thank you. Yes. Thank you again, Ashley. Thank you so very much.

Believing that science provided better answers than religion, and faced with the problem of evil in the world, Erik viewed Christianity as just a pleasant myth. But after becoming dissatisfied with his conclusions, his search for meaning led him to affirm the truth and reliability of the Christian faith. If you’d like to know more about Erik or his apologetics work, you can follow him on: Instagram: @isjesusalive Twitter: @IsJesusAlive Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/isjesusalive Website:  isjesusalive.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TestifyApologetics Erik mentioned these resources on the podcast: William Lane Craig and Reasonable Faith: https://www.reasonablefaith.org Gary Habermas on the Resurrection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay_Db4RwZ_M&ab_channel=TheVeritasForum Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining me today. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. We all want to make sense of the world around us, of the world within us. We want our lives to mean something, to be going somewhere. We want our lives to be valuable and satisfying. When life doesn’t seem to offer that and we don’t know where to find it, it can leave us feeling a bit confused and conflicted, wondering if there’s anything more to life than we know or experience. Is this all there is? This existential dissatisfaction can prompt a thinking person to reconsider where they are and who they are in life. It can cause them to take a closer look at their own beliefs, because ideas have consequences. They affect not only the way we think but also the way we live, and even whether life is worth living at all.  Cognitive or emotional dissidence, while sometimes uncomfortable, can become unlivable. This tension can spark a desire to search for truth that brings real meaning and satisfaction to life, that helps us make sense of the world, of others, and of ourselves. That’s the story we’ll be listening to today, but it also rings true for many stories, perhaps for your story, for we all want to make sense of our lives to find out what, at times, seems so illusive. So I hope you’ll enjoy listening to Erik Manning. He’s a former atheist who’s been down this path but finally found what he had been looking for in the place he had been avoiding for a very long time. Hello, Erik, and welcome to the Side B Podcast. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Erik, as we’re getting started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, what you do, where you live perhaps? Sure. My name is Erik Manning, and I am a freelance website designer. I also have a website, IsJesusAlive.com, which is like a blog dedicated to providing information about the Christian worldview and mostly historical apologetics, like reasons to believe that the New Testament is historically reliable. That sounds very interesting, and obviously you’ve come a long way from atheism, so I’ll be interested to hear more about that as we go, now that you have, it sounds like, kind of a public apologetics ministry. That’s really fascinating. So let’s go to the flip side of that, and I want to hear the beginning of your story. Because you weren’t always into a apologetics or Christianity. You were more along the atheistic understanding of life and worldview. So tell me how your story towards atheism started. Take me back to where you grew up, perhaps your family, and any view of God there. Sure. Well, I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, actually, until I was about seven or eight years old. I went to catholic school. My father actually taught at a catholic school. My grandparents were very heavily into Catholicism and made sure that they took us to Mass every Sunday, and I even had my First Communion. And then we moved away. They lived in Michigan, and we ended up moving to St. Louis. My parents took jobs there. And my parents… Well, my grandparents were very religious. My parents weren’t really as religious at all, and my dad was kind of more agnostic, I would say, and even had some kind of hostility towards God. He’s not that way now. He has become a Christian since then. And then my mom was just very—oh, I don’t know. She just kind of thought that there was many ways to God and kind of relativistic as far as religion goes, and so, once we moved away to St. Louis, we barely kept up with our church attendance at all, and so it just wasn’t something that they were any longer interested in. As a child, I remember at times praying and talking to God. I wasn’t closed off to God. But things really changed as I became a teenager, and so what happened is I just started to observe the world around me a little bit. My parents were into alcohol, and that kind of made things rough growing up, and then a lot of my friends also came from pretty broken homes as well. A lot of single-parent homes. Around this time in St. Louis, there was a huge flood that got a lot of national attention, and so you see these disasters and then—you just look at the history of the world and all these wars and pain and suffering and looking at my own life and my friends’ lives and just seeing all this pain and suffering, and that’s when I began to become very skeptical of God and religion. And along the way, too, I mean you’re going to school and you are hearing things about like Neo-Darwinism, and that seemed to explain human origins to me a little bit better than a couple in a garden talking to a snake or something like that. I remember reading those stories as a kid and then hearing these things in my science class, and I’m not saying they had some sort of anti-God agenda by teaching me that, but it just brought me to a conclusion that maybe science has better answers than religion and also if God exists—it’s just kind of the typical problem of evil. How could He allow all of these things to happen, so He just probably doesn’t exist, and so that’s how I eventually became an atheist. So just a combination of a lot of different things, the observation of the world around you, inside of you, just things seemed to be rather broken, plus science had a better explanation. Right. So you had had some kind of positive experiences of God as a child, but that obviously faded away as these doubts arose and you became kind of, I guess, more informed in terms of things of the world and things in education, and it just didn’t seem convincing to you anymore. So I just wonder, even as a teenager, as you were drifting away from “the God thing,” in your mind, what was belief in God or Christianity or religion—what was that to you? Was it some kind of a fairy tale or mythology? Yeah. I would say so. It just seemed to me like it was like a pleasant myth that people wanted to believe, maybe really wished very strongly to believe, but to me, it just seemed like those people were just kind of blinded and duped and deceived, and if they really were as thoughtful as other people, they would’ve obviously realized this. And so that’s just basically how I viewed Christians and Christianity. I didn’t really have a whole lot of interaction with too many Christians. I’ve had, like, a friend across the street from me that invited me to a church lock-in one time, but it didn’t really make much of a difference to me. I was probably there more for games and free food. Yeah. So this was just at a younger age. This was around 14, 15 years old or so. And so there was that. I just kind of thought that these people were, like I said, just wanted to believe something to maybe give them hope or feel better about their lives or feel comforted, but I didn’t think that it had any sort of basis whatsoever, and I just kind of thought that they were just going by what everybody else had taught and just didn’t really think these things through for themselves. I’m curious. As you, again, were becoming more and more skeptical of belief in God and Christianity, did you ever ask any questions to any kind of church leader or any other Christian that you knew of, how they could perhaps answer questions about the relationship of science and belief in God? No. How would they… No? Yeah, no. I just… I never sought anybody out to ask the questions. It’s strange because a lot of times people become an atheist or a Christian because somebody really reached out to them one way or the other and tried to persuade them. In my case, I just mostly… I was just, on my own, thinking through these things, I guess. Of course, as I became a Christian, I wouldn’t at all downplay the role of the Holy Spirit. Without Him, I’d definitely wouldn’t have changed my mind, but I was just really on my own. I didn’t really know who I could ask questions to. I didn’t really know who I could even really reach out to, and no Christians, aside from, like I said, a friend who invited me to church, really reached out to me a whole lot. Or even tried to talk to me about these things. So as you were shedding, I guess, the superstition and the delusion of Christianity behind and you took God off the table, as it were, did you understand or really think about what you were embracing, in terms of a naturalistic, atheistic worldview and all the implications of that? Yeah. I would say so. As an atheist, I thought right and wrong couldn’t possibly exist. I was very morally nihilistic. Because if there is no God, I just believed that there was no real basis for morality. And there was no point of just being moral for the sake of convention. I would just act in pretty much whatever way served my best interest at the moment. Not that I wanted to be the worst person in the world, but I just had a very kind of grim outlook on life. I got involved a lot into drugs and different things like that. I got into a crowd of people that were not necessarily a great group of people. A lot of high school drop-outs, a lot of people that lived out of kind of like a low-income housing project that were involved in some things that weren’t necessarily great. Although I never got really involved into all of the things that they got involved in, I very much could have gone down a path that they did. A lot of these kids that I knew, these friends of mine, got arrested, ended up in juvenile hall. One of the guys that I’m friends with out of this group just got out of prison not that long ago. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so just running around with a group of people that weren’t necessarily the best influence on me. And like I said, I wasn’t trying to necessarily be the worst person in the world, but I just figured right and wrong are just a matter of convention, and so if lying here might benefit me or not hurt somebody else’s feelings, there’s nothing objectively wrong with that. And I just felt like life was very meaningless. It was kind of pointless and depressing, and I think that’s probably where some of the drugs and distractions of hanging around with the wrong people came from. And so yeah it was just a pretty grim outlook. And it was really hard to be consistent with that, because one moment you’re saying, “There’s no real right and wrong,” but the next minute, if somebody wrongs you, you’re like, “Hey! Something bad has happened. There’s been an injustice,” you know? And it’s like, “Okay, well where does that idea come from?” It’s hard to be consistent and just go, “Well, I guess that’s just my feelings,” and so… yeah. Just a lot of involvement in some of the wrong things, and again, I don’t think that everybody who is an atheist and is even a moral nihilist is going to go that route. It’s just the route that I ended up drifting off to, but I think part of that, too, just came from being in a home that wasn’t the most secure and searching for acceptance and belonging in the wrong kind of group. So that inconsistency that you’re describing, that sensibility that you know in your own worldview you don’t have perhaps grounding for moral facts or why you’re sensing that something is really right or wrong, but yet you know that that seems to be an inherent part of the way you think and act, and so I wonder: Did that inconsistency cause any dissonance in you? I mean, was it something that was disturbing enough for you to resolve? Or was it just something that you kind of lived with? It was mostly something that I kind of lived with. And maybe I didn’t always see that inconsistency, but it was kind of like a stone in my shoe at times, because it just didn’t seem to jive with the way reality really is. And so that was a problem. I would say that the other things that caused me to reconsider was, while I couldn’t understand maybe where humans came from—and I told you that science seemed to tell us origins of people and all the life that we see, seemed to explain that. It was kind of hard to explain, you know, “Where did the universe come from? How is it just here for no reason at all and completely un-caused and have this appearance of beauty and even purpose and design. How are all of my intuitions about all of these things, and everybody else’s intuitions about these things, seemingly wrong? It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And so these things started to bother me, and eventually, I sort of became more like an agnostic, I guess, but I would lean towards maybe deism. I thought, “Well, maybe God created the universe, but He’s not really involved. He’s not really active in the universe.” And so I began to become open. And then there was also the fact that there were kids I went to school with that were involved with an accident and had died at like 16 years old. They were just at work, and I think there were some downed power lines, and something tragic happened there. I had another friend who was just in the wrong place in the city, in St. Louis, and was—well, I’d call him more of an acquaintance, I guess, than a friend, but he got shot. A classmate. And so I started to think about mortality, and is there life after death, and if there is possibly a God, then life after death isn’t something that would be implausible, and it would be something absolutely desirable. And so this caused me to become a little bit more open. And so I would say I would’ve leaned towards a deism, but even then, that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, either. Because if God just created the world and gave us these moral intuitions, why doesn’t He do more? Why doesn’t He step and at least say hello? So that’s when I became a little bit more open to the possibility that maybe there could be some kind of a religion that could be true. So I’m just curious in terms of the timeline how long you lived in an atheistic worldview and then moved towards being a little skeptical of your own skepticism. Did that turn around in short order? Or was that a prolonged process? It was a couple of years. And so I think I spent a lot of that time just not even thinking about it, just being busy doing the dumb and irresponsible things I was probably into. And then just as time went on, I just felt very dissatisfied with that. And just began to reconsider these questions. As I was nearing the end of high school, I started thinking like—you know how it is. You just start to think, “What am I going to do with my life? What am I going to do after I get out of school?” And just seeing, again, these broken homes around me and seeing my parents and my friends’ parents just living kind of boring, miserable, mundane lives that they feel like they have to kind of self medicate themselves with alcohol and things like that. I just was like, “I don’t want life to be like that.” And just so many people, they get up, they go to work, and they put food on the table, and they entertain themselves and maybe go on vacation and then hope to retire. And I just thought, “I don’t want my life to be like that. I don’t want to live a boring life like that. I hope that there’s more meaning than this,” and I don’t think that you’re going to find meaning in some of these other ways that other people try to find meaning, maybe through fame or some sort of popularity, or different things like that, and so just seeing the meaninglessness of life and the absurdity of life just made me kind of hungry and hoping that there was at least more. So obviously you were then more open towards considering another perspective. So when you became open, did you start looking at God in a Christian sense because that was your childhood reference, in a sense? I had hoped Christianity wasn’t true. Oh, okay. So I wanted there to be something else besides Christianity to be true, and so I didn’t start there. It sounds funny, but I actually started with Islam a little bit. And this sounds kind of immature and silly, but Spike Lee’s Malcolm X movie was very popular at that time, and I didn’t really… At first it seemed like it was all this racial stuff, but towards the end of the movie, he made his pilgrimage to Mecca, and he had kind of an enlightenment experience about things, and I don’t know, that just sort of stuck out to me. And I know it sounds maybe kind of immature, but it was impactful to me, and so… Now, I’m going to tell my age a little bit. I’m 41, so at that time I couldn’t just go to Google and start researching Islam or other religions, and so I had to go to the library, and I would look at… And my dad had a book on Islam. And so I would read some of that, and I would try and study it, and I just didn’t get very far before I realized that this just didn’t have the ring of truth, and it just seemed a little archaic and odd and strange, and I’m sure if I kept reading I would’ve found some of the troubling passages that seem to incite violence, and there’s just a lot of inconsistencies with Islam. But anyway, I didn’t really get that far. I just got far enough to realize, like, “I don’t think this appeals to me very much, and I’m going to at least put it on the shelf for now and look at something else.” And so then I started looking at non-canonical Christian scriptures, from the library, just wondering if maybe some sort of off brand of Christianity could possibly be true, which, again, I was just a 17-year-old kid. I didn’t know a whole lot. Nobody had taught me these things. But I tried to read through that, and that stuff was just woo woo. I mean it just didn’t seem to be very historical or interesting to me at all. And so I remembered that my grandma, when I had my First Communion, she gave me a Bible. And it was buried in our basement after 10 years of it probably sitting there, and I went and I dug it up, and thankfully I was able to find it, and I just started reading the Bible. I started reading the Bible almost every day after school. I mean I still was involved in some goofy stuff with my friends, but I probably would read the Bible sometimes several hours a day. Oh, my! And so I just was interested and hoped that maybe there were answers there, and I just wanted to at least give it the time of day before I made a decision. So again, I’m just curious. In your life, you were reading the Bible, and you were reading these stories in the Bible, but there was no one in your life that really embodied Christianity in the way it was being lived out? That you could read the Bible and go, “Oh, yeah. I see. I know a person like that who calls themself a Christian who actually adheres to or believes in what I’m reading in the scripture.” There was finally one person that I also helped maybe to become a little bit more open. And he was my favorite teacher. I always—no matter how my grades were in school, history was always something that I just loved and enjoyed. And that’s probably why I do have so much of a focus on historical apologetics in the New Testament. I’ve always just been drawn to history. And I had a teacher, Mr. [Hollam 24:58], which one of these days I need to reach out to him and thank him, but he was a Nazarene man. His dad was a pastor, and he would talk about his personal life and just tell stories. Somehow it would mix in through sociology class or history class or something. And he was just a really down to earth guy. He was funny. He was extremely kind, extremely nice. If I needed mercy for some reason. Maybe I forgot a homework assignment. He was always merciful. He was also very intelligent, and I just thought, “Well, he’s an intelligent guy, and so if he believes this stuff, then maybe it isn’t just for the unthinking, unwashed masses. Maybe there is something to this.” And so I think he was a real light to me, and I’m very grateful for the influence that he had on me. It sounds like he really did have an impact on your life in terms of creating an openness towards the Bible. Especially if he taught history and you were interested in history. And I’m curious: As you were beginning to read the Bible, considering you had read these other religious texts. I know that the Bible has different kinds of literary genre in it, but did you find a sense of history or historical reality in what you were reading? Well, that was part of my problem, at first at least, but yes eventually I did. The problem that I had when I would read the Bible is the miracles. Because I had never experienced a miracle. I had never seen a miracle. I didn’t know anybody else, at least in my circle of influence or friends, that had ever experienced a miracle, that I knew about, at least, and so when I would read the stories in the gospels about Jesus healing people or feeding 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, I thought, “Well, what kind of a weird story is this?” I’m reading the Sermon on the Mount, and I think, “These are really profound ethical teachings that are just very interesting and very fascinating, and something that I would imagine would be something I should try and strive to live my life after,” but then I’d get to the miracle stories, and I thought, “Well, is there a lesson that’s trying to be taught here? What is going on?” And no, they were actually trying to give us historical reports, and I just thought, “Well, these have to be legends or these just have to be some sort of weird lessons that I’m not understanding,” but when you read the healing narratives or the miracle narratives, they just read like, “This is what happened, and we’re not embarrassed to say it.” And so those would trouble me. Those would kind of stick out to me, and I just had a hard time dismissing those. Eventually I’m sure I came to Paul’s writings where he talks about resurrection appearances, and the way that he reported those, as if like, “Yes, these really happened,” and I thought, “Well, that’s a bit strange.” And then, reading 1 John, the first few verses in the First Epistle of John, where he talks about that which we’ve seen and handled with our own hands, and I just thought, “Okay, well this is a supernatural Jesus from start to finish. There is no really watering this down, and so I have to come to these claims that this is really what they believed,” and I couldn’t just dismiss it. So then I guess it wasn’t off-putting enough or too uncomfortable that you didn’t continue to read, actually. So what was compelling you to read, despite the fact that you were, in some ways, pushing against it intellectually? Well, I would read the Psalms, and I really would see David’s fearlessness towards death. He would say things like, “The Lord is my light and my salvation. Of whom shall I fear?” and again I had that fear of death that I think every human being, whether they’d like to admit it or not, it does drive them, and I just thought, “Well, that’s really awesome, how he’s just so bold and unafraid,” and that really would stick out to me. I thought the practical wisdom of the proverbs were very interesting to me. It was a lot of the moral teaching that actually really stuck out to me. Like I said, reading the Sermon on the Mount. It’s just like, “Well, whoever this Jesus guy is, one thing I can’t really say is that he’s not a very strong moral teacher,” you know? And so I just thought his personality and what he taught was very interesting, even though there were some times there would be uncomfortable sayings that I didn’t always fully understand. I would read occasionally the epistles, and sometimes I wouldn’t understand it, sometimes I would, but the teaching on love and different things like that. It just seemed to me like, “This is a very high ethical way to live, which is very different than what I have been living,” and it just felt like a meaningful way to live. And so there were existential reasons that I was really drawn to it. Even though my head was bucking against all the miracle stuff. And I also read Ecclesiastes, and when he’s talking about “meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless,” I’m like, “Yeah. I can resonate with that, Buddy.” Yeah! Yeah. And so that really stuck out to me. But at the end, he concludes that, like, “Hey, fear God and keep his commandments, and this is what’s important and what every man ought to do,” and I’m like, “Well, even he’s concluding that this is the way to live after all of that ranting about there is nothing new under the sun and it’s all vain and meaningless. And so those things kept me hooked, I would say, enough to keep looking. At least hoping that it could possibly be true, and so yeah, I would say that my feelings changed from being hostile to at least sort of hoping that it was true, even though I knew I’d really have to radically change my life, and I think doing that was still a bit scary to me. I’m sure. I’m sure. Because when you believe the claims of the Bible as true, there are, in a sense… There’s a certain demand on your life if you accept that truth. So there was something attractive about a life that you found there. Morally, ethically, existentially, it provided a lot of meaning. That there would be no fear of death. All of those things were seemingly attractive to you. So what happened from there? How did you resolve this intellectual kind of existential tension that was going on? Yeah. Well, as I said, it did seem like they were really reporting genuine miracles, and so, even though I didn’t understand them, I thought, “Well, they at least believe they’re giving historical accounts,” and one day I did get to 1 John, and it just stuck out to me, and I thought, “Well, I’m going to read this.” Well, let me back up real quick. Before I say that, one thing that also kept me going—and this is kind of a side journey, and then I’ll answer your question. I was working. I worked at a restaurant, and somebody handed me a little bag with some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which is still my favorite candy to this day. I could probably live off of a diet of peanut butter if I had to, but anyway, in that, there was a little gospel tract by Billy Graham. That was the very first time that I heard the Gospel presented, a message of… Man is sinful, that we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God, that God so loved the world that He gave His son, so that, if we believe in Him, we could have everlasting life, that He solves the sin problem, that He reconciles us to God, and even though I didn’t believe it or accept it at that point, it was the first time where I was like, “Oh, I actually understand the logic of the Gospel.” Finally. Even though I went to Catholic school for however long. And I’m not badmouthing Catholics whatsoever, but I’m just saying I was a kid, and I probably just didn’t remember. But that was the first time I really heard it. And that was my bookmark. That tract became my bookmark in my Bible. But for whatever reason, I kept reading, and after months and months and months, I started to really read the First Epistle of John, and I got to the part where he says, “Do not love the world. All the things in the world, the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, those things will pass away.” But he who lives for God, basically, who does the will of the Lord, shall live forever. And I don’t know why, but that just really hit me like a ton of bricks, and I just thought about, “I have loved the world. I have just kind of lived for the pride of life and the lust of the flesh and all of this stuff,” and as I read it, there was this Presence in the room, and at first I was like, “What is going on? It feels like there is somebody else in this room with me,” and it just felt very palpable and really hard to deny, and it was very, very overwhelming. And I was kind of nervous and kind of scared, and I thought, like, “Am I delusional or something?” and as I was sitting there thinking about it, I’m like, “This is God. I have prayed along this time and said, ‘God, if You’re real, I’m open. You can show me.'” And this overwhelming sense of God was suddenly in my room. And I don’t remember what I said. All I know is I got down on my knees because I was raised Catholic, and that’s the position you pray in, I guess. But I got down on my knees, and I just—I don’t know what I said, but I repented and believed, and I just felt this huge weight lift off me, and I was just surrounded in this bubble of peace and joy, and I just knew I had been accepted and that God loves me, and I have this surreal peace, and it was just very overwhelming almost and hard to deny, and so I guess a lot of people would just call this a religious experience. And so that just kind of overwhelmed my sense of doubt because it was like, “I don’t believe in miracles,” and I know this wouldn’t qualify as a miracle. I didn’t see water get turned into wine or something, but it was just this palpable sense of the presence of God that just pushed me over the edge, and that’s how I became a Christian. So you believed that God was real and that He wasn’t hidden, that He was actually in your room. Yeah. Absolutely. And it was just really, like I said, just so hard to deny, and so this experience was just overwhelming, and so yeah. It just kind of overcame whatever objections that I may have had in my head. Not to say that I haven’t taken the time since to look at those things and find answers for those things, but for where I was at at the time, as an almost 18-year-old kid, that was definitely enough for me at that moment. Wow! That sounds like an amazing experience. So convincing for you at that moment. I’m impressed, too, by the reality that you actually prayed to God that you were open and for Him to show you, and I guess He answered that prayer. Yeah. Absolutely. So then you considered yourself a Christian after that point. And you went on to, I guess in some ways, resolve those preexisting intellectual doubts. What did you do with miracles? I guess after you experienced the reality of the presence of God, perhaps the reality or the possibility of miracles becomes possible, I guess. Well, yeah. If God does exist, and He wants to reveal himself in a way that would be unmistakable, or just reach out and help somebody, then miracles would absolutely be possible. Yeah. That was basically my line of thinking. It was like, “Well, if He wants to reveal Himself, who am I to tell Him what he can and can’t do?” And even those problems of evil that kind of stuck out to me before, I just thought, “Well, He would definitely be in a better position than I am. Epistemically, there’s a pretty big distance between me and God.” And so I think the problem of evil got resolved for me that way, and then just realizing, well, if God does exist and he created the universe, then Him healing somebody or raising Lazarus from the dead or being resurrected himself just doesn’t seem like it’s all that far fetched now. So you were also then able to integrate your understanding of science and your belief in God? That those two things weren’t necessarily opposed to each other but actually perhaps complementary? That happened much later down the road. I was trying to talk to a couple of people that I worked with. This was, oh, I don’t know, maybe 15 years later, and so I had been to Bible school since then. To me, the evidence for God that I had, at least at that moment, was I’ve had other experiences with God or maybe I felt like He has led me down certain paths and helped me make certain decisions in life or answered certain prayers, and so I felt like that was enough evidence for me at that particular time, but I was at work with a couple of skeptical friends, and somehow the subject got turned to religion, and I started to kind of share with them, because I thought, “Okay, well here’s a good opportunity to maybe be a witness.” And they just shot me down. One of the guys was very educated. He was very much into science and engineering and all kinds of different things like that. That was his jam. That’s what he did in his spare time was just learn more about science and physics and all of this other kind of stuff, and he just shot me down, said the Bible was totally incompatible, and that really pushed me into apologetics. I just felt really like I had failed. And so I began to search on YouTube and through Google and all these different things, and I came across ministries like Reasonable Faith and William Lane Craig, and I came across other ministries that seemed to be able to help me resolve these issues, and I began to see that really good science leads us to understand that God is the best explanation for the origin of the universe or the appearance of design in the universe. And I was able to share some of these things with them, and I was surprised. He kind of became open to the idea of intelligent design, and so I don’t know if he had already seen some of these things and was already becoming open previous, but that was something that helped me resolve some of those tensions for sure, and if anything, it just really strengthened my faith, but because I’ve always been really drawn to history, I also started looking at a lot of the historical stuff, particularly the resurrection. I think the very first time I heard Gary Habermas give a presentation on the resurrection on YouTube, I was just enthralled. And I just thought, “Wow! I believed in the resurrection, but I didn’t understand that there was so much good historical evidence to back up my belief in the resurrection,” and it just kind of married an interest of mine to my faith, and from there, I just really started digging into that kind of thing. So you developed, I guess, what you would call a much more integrated understanding of reality, whereas as an atheist, there were certain things that you couldn’t make sense of in your world, in your worldview, but it sounds like, as a Christian, you were able to pull all the parts together, whether it’s the way you live existentially, the way you think about history and science, the big questions, the big questions of the origin of the universe, the design, and even the resurrection, which a lot of people would probably think you just believe that on faith, but no, there’s actually historical grounding for that. That must be, in a sense, very intellectually satisfying, as well as existentially satisfying, that all of these parts come together. Yeah. For me, it was like just this extra… What’s the word that I’m looking for? Just another kind of peg in the stool to help support what I had already believed, and so I felt like I had very good experiential reasons to believe in God, from, like I said, times of answered prayer or a sense of guidance or a sense of maybe spiritual experience, and I felt like I had good existential reasons to believe in God because I felt like it made the most sense, of sin and death and some of the meaning and purpose and value and different things like that. But when that faith was challenged by people when I tried to share my faith and I didn’t know how to answer, that became very frustrating to me, and so, like I said, that just really pushed me into seeing, like, “Okay, well are there good intellectual reasons to believe this?” And I came to find out that, yeah, there absolutely are. And so that’s really become a quest of mine, to help arm Christians to be able to better defend and articulate their faith in an intelligent way, because in this day and age, in order to do any sort of evangelism whatsoever, you have to be trained in apologetics of some sort. While I think being able to tell your testimony and your experience is powerful, you could also support that with evidence for the resurrection, or maybe you can give people arguments for the existence of God. When I sat and looked back at my testimony, for example, and I thought, “Well, even though nobody sat and told me the moral argument, the moral argument reasoning, the reasoning behind that argument, helped me get back to theism eventually,” and so that was another argument that just really stood out to me and is something I’ve endeavored to master. And so, once I saw those intellectual reasons, it just increased my confidence more in seeing that there are good defenses against the problem of evil or objections against miracles, like what Hume articulated is kind of what I was thinking as a teenager, but seeing that those objections can be readily met just increased my confidence so much more, and that’s what I endeavor to do with my website now, is to help equip and train, like I said, believers in seeing that there are good answers out there. That’s fantastic! And can you tell us the name of your website again, please? Yeah. It’s IsJesusAlive.com. And also on there there is a link. I have a YouTube channel I’m starting. It’s kind of a little bit of a fledgling YouTuber at the moment, but I am putting some of those answers in a video format as well that are out there, so yeah. People are free to check that out. Well, that’s fantastic! I guess that would be really beneficial, not only for Christians who are looking to substantiate their worldview or their faith, but it would also be interesting for perhaps a curious skeptic who wants to see if there could be intellectual grounding for the Christian worldview. Yeah, absolutely. Pretty much, my aim is to… There are doubters in both camps. There are people who were like me, that were kind of doubting their skepticism, and then there are Christians who might be doubting their own faith, and then there are believers who want to help somebody else in those two categories, and so it would be beneficial for anybody in those three different groups. That’s fantastic. This is a wonderful story, Erik, and I’m curious: There’s not many people that you meet who were once atheist and are now Christian and understand it from both sides, but because you are and you’ve actually heard both sides and lived both sides, I wonder what you would tell the curious skeptic if they were perhaps open towards another point of view. If you had a moment to tell them something, what would you advise them? What I would say to the curious skeptic is stay curious. I prayed, as I said, and said, “Well, God, I don’t know if You’re real, but if You are real, I am open.” And be genuine. So many skeptics I meet are almost looking to disprove, and so be open. Think about the existential reasons and give those deep consideration. I wouldn’t encourage them to want to believe something and therefore put their blinders on and just come to belief for bad reasons, but just be open and be honest with God, and again, say, “God, if You’re real, help me. You know what my doubts are. Help me to find those answers, and help me to find maybe the people or the resources that can help me overcome these things.” And just read the Bible. Give it its day in court like I did. Just keep reading and stay open, and if you have questions, again, there are so many resources. I wish I had the resources that are online today than when I was younger. And so find the best answers, and I’m not at all intimidated by the other side and what they have to say. Listen to what they have to say, too, and weigh it out, but I believe if you are sincere, God will absolutely reveal Himself to you, to that curious seeking skeptic. Yeah, it’s amazing to me, in all of the stories that I’ve heard in my research, the number of people who’ve called out to God or prayed to God or opened themselves to God in some way, and God did show up. In different ways for different people. Certainly, He showed up for you in a very profound way. But yeah, there’s something to be said for that, just being open. And to the Christian, Erik, what advice would you give to the Christian? I know you’ve already given some with regard to just preparing. Yeah. I would say definitely prepare. Again, in order to do evangelism, you really do need to have some basic understanding of apologetics. There are so many good resources out there on YouTube, podcasts, books. There’s really just no excuse anymore not to be trained. But also reach out. I had one person hand me a tract, and I had one high school teacher just be kind of a good character witness, and that was about the most interaction I had with Christians that I’m aware of. Maybe people were praying for me behind the scenes, and I definitely wouldn’t understate the importance of that, so possibly that had some effect, but sometimes I just think back, and I’m like, “I know there were Christians at my school. Why didn’t any of them come talk to me?” And so… Do something. Say something. In my case, somebody handed me candy and a Billy Graham tract. That might be enough to help sow a good seed into somebody, but too many Christians are so tight lipped and just don’t even think about it and are so oblivious that there really is a world around you of people who, like me at that time, felt pretty hopeless and that there wasn’t much meaning to life, and if an intelligent, thoughtful Christian came by and talked to me sooner, maybe I wouldn’t have wasted as much time as I did. I don’t know. So don’t be afraid to reach out. And I think one reason why so many Christians are afraid is because they are afraid of those objections, and so train yourself on that. I know, for me, that made me so much more of a bold witness to people and unafraid to share the gospel with people, because I can anticipate objections and have a good idea, at least, where to go, and that definitely… Knowledge does give confidence there, and so that absolutely is key as well. And so there’s the boldness aspect and of course prayer, the spiritual aspect, and then just the mental preparation aspect of being prepared in apologetics. That’s some terrific advice. One thing that strikes me as I’m listening to your story, so many times the narrative for people excepting Jesus or coming to faith is because they’re just part of a culture or a family that does that and so that just becomes part of the hobby or the movement of the family, or it’s just cultural, but what’s interesting about your story is a really counter narrative to that. You were very independent, really, throughout your journeying, whether it was towards atheism, towards agnosticism, or even towards Christianity, although I must say perhaps not all alone, because it seems to me that God was showing up in different places throughout your journey and pointing you as He was drawing you to Himself, and you, at some point, became willing to see. So it was really a beautiful journey, though, and I’m so grateful that you’ve come on our podcast today to share that. So thank you so much for coming on, Erik. Yes. Definitely. Thank God for His grace and patience with me as He slowly led me along the way and yeah, it’s absolutely been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Erik’s story. You can connect with Erik on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and his website, all of which I’ve included on the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me at email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please consider subscribing and sharing 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 listening to the other side.

As an atheist, Rob Oram presumed God didn’t exist until unexpected circumstances caused him to reconsider. Trained as an investigator, he began to look at the question of God more closely. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Side B is that side of the story that you don’t usually hear. Growing up, I used to buy vinyl records and listen to side A, the popular song that everyone knew and loved, but oftentimes, side B would just get ignored. It just wasn’t as well known, perhaps not worth listening to. Occasionally, I’d turn the record over and give it a chance. Every once in a while, I’d find a song that I rather liked and began listening to it even more than the song that I’d bought the record for in the first place. In the same way, we’re naturally driven towards the songs of people that we like, the ideas that we believe, side A, and we don’t often give the other side, side B, a chance, and when we do, we sometimes find ourselves a bit surprised by what we hear. We might even come to like it. We become more open to a different idea, a different way to think about the world and our lives. At the very least, listening to other perspectives helps us understand and relate to each other better than to distance and to stereotype and ignore. That’s the purpose of the Side B Podcast, to hopefully interest you in listening to ideas and perspectives you may not have heard. For Christians, it’s to help you understand the lives and perspectives of skeptics and the various reasons they may push away from God, and for skeptics, it’s to help you see how and why intelligent, thinking people may actually turn from disbelief to belief in God. Welcome to the podcast, Rob. It’s so great to have you on the show! It’s lovely to be with you, Jana. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself. Obviously, I hear something very English in your speech. Where are you from? Yes. So I’m in Hereford, England. You might detect a Cockney twang. Some people sometimes accuse me of being from Australia, but no, I’m from London, England. Yeah, so I moved out to Hereford four years ago, which is in the west part of England. I’m 46 years old. A former policeman. I was a policeman for nearly five years, and then I basically left to become a legal advisor in criminal defense, so in a sense, I went from arresting people to defending them, and then you could say, or someone said to me a few years ago, which I quite liked, “So you’ve gone from arresting people to defending them to now trying to save them,” because I’m now in the ministry with the Church of England. I’m a vicar, or in America you might say a pastor, with the Church of England, which I’ve been doing for the last six years, I suppose, if you include the training. Well, since this show is about talking with former atheists, now that you are a reverend, you really have gone full circle. I’m eager to get into your story. That’s quite a change over a lifetime. So why don’t we, at the beginning, just set the context for where your beliefs in atheism arose? Tell me about your understanding of God and religion and faith growing up. What kind of community were you in? What kind of family were you in? Did anyone believe in God? Or not? Why don’t you talk with me about that? Yeah, sure. I came from a loving but very secular household. So I grew up with… I’ve got two brothers, a foster brother, a sister, so we lived in a large house, a large household. But we never went to church or anything like that. I had loving parents, but certainly God was never part of things, really. We grew up interested in various sports and all the rest of it, and I certainly grew up very much as a practical atheist, I suppose. I never really thought about matters of God, and I very much lived… Certainly, as I grew up, as I got older, I lived for myself, so now I would look back and I can look back, and you’re probably, if I go into different parts of my story, you’ll hear why, I lived very much in rebellion towards God and very self centered, and it never occurred to me that there’d be a reason to do otherwise. Well, no, it’s not that it didn’t… It seemed to me the only way to logically live was for yourself, but actually the strange hypocrisy of that, if you like, as I grew up and got to my late teenage years, and especially at university, it became even more abundant, “What’s the point?” So I never took the trouble of investigating God until later on, and I’ll explain when and why that happened, but to me, it was just a given that… It just seemed natural, it just seemed innate that you’d live for yourself. What’s the point in doing anything else? And then actually, more than that, what’s the point of anything? And I became increasingly basically an apathetic hedonist. Those are the words I would use. My atheism was basically just borne out by a deep sense of apathy and hedonism. And there instinctively didn’t seem to me any greater point, meaning, purpose, or value in life than beyond those things. Now, I can look at Paul in the Bible, in, I think it’s 1 Corinthians, you know, “eat, drink, for tomorrow we die,” if there is no God. These sorts of things. So I just lived by that presumption, as if there was no God. Right. I guess there weren’t any other pictures in terms of Christianity, embodied Christianity, other Christians or religious influences around you that even made you question whether or not God existed? Or if you didn’t or didn’t have anything like that, what did you think that God and Christianity and all of that was? Yeah. I thought it was… Secularism has obviously been fairly rampant in the West, especially England, probably even more, a lot more so, actually, than America. And so you’re kind of indoctrinated from an early age, because everybody else tends to think the same, where within all of the media, within all of popular culture, at least the majority of it, it’s as if we’ve grown beyond that, and without making any effort, one is indoctrinated to believe that there’s no more truth to Christianity. Jesus Christ is no more real than Father Christmas, to give a silly example. Which now is bizarre when you actually stop and look at the evidence, but to me, it was just the cliched types of things when I looked at or came across Christians. I remember, at university for example, arguing with Christians on campus on a couple of occasions, and that was where I was clearly an atheist and would come across as an angry atheist to them, because my presumption, and these were no more than presumptions, was just that Christianity was a strange crutch for deluded people. I remember seeing a documentary in which Peter Atkins, an Oxford… great friend of Richard Dawkins, just said that anybody… “What do you think of people who believe?” he was asked, and he just said that they’re stupid. And I think, back then, I just assumed the same thing, that people were giving some attachment to some delusion because it made them feel better. Or more than that, I just suspected that people became Christians because they were just selfish, and so I remember challenging them, saying, “So why are you a Christian?” and basically suggesting that, “Well, you’re just a Christian because you want some deity to take care of you. Because actually you’re obsessed with your own salvation,” and I knew enough to know about Christianity to know that supposedly it was a route to salvation, and therefore, by default, my assumption was that these strange weirdos, these strange Christians, were just deluded people who needed a crutch who were just obsessed with getting themselves saved. And therefore actually it’s not a religion of love and charity and all the rest of it, but actually, deep down, Christians were just selfish people who wanted some mystical deity to save them. Does that make sense? I mean now as I try and say this stuff, it sounds nonsense, but this was kind of the way I thought back then. Right, yeah. You describe yourself as somewhat of an apathetic hedonist, but perhaps that was a little bit later on, in the sense that, if you had so much anger and contempt, that doesn’t sound apathetic to me. It sounds like you had a rather strong sense of self about your atheism and a strong opinion otherwise about Christianity. Yes. I was very suspicious. Regarding myself and how I lived, I lived with enormous apathy and hedonism, so together. But in terms of how I viewed Christians, because I never actually looked properly into Christianity, but I viewed Christians with great suspicion for kind of the reasons that I just mentioned. Right. So yeah, I was a strange mix. We all are. We all are. Indeed, we are. Right. So you lived this way, with this sense of apathy and really a sense of self pursuit in your own way because you didn’t see any meaning or purpose in life, and I’m impressed with that statement in the sense that, as an atheist, you must have been somewhat thoughtful about what atheism was or what naturalism brought or did not bring. It seems to me that, when you absorb atheism within secular culture, oftentimes, you just go with the flow and really don’t think about the implications of that worldview, but in a sense, you had really considered atheism in some regard, in that… Did you really think through those implications of there’s no real objective meaning, purpose, value, morality, those kinds of things? At all? For me, it was on a subconscious level. One of the things maybe we’ll get to shortly that was a big trigger was a William Lane Craig essay, when he wrote, “Is there meaning to life without God?” or something. I think he ended up putting it in one or two of his books, but it absolutely shook me to the core, because he brilliantly articulated everything I’d always kind of assumed and lived by, and so I was confronted with it, but before I read that—and a lot of things happened before I did read that—I had just lived with a sort of subconscious… Everyone lives with a subconscious awareness that life is fleeting and that they are going to die, so I always had a strong sense of my own mortality. It’s just this inescapable end. The inescapable destiny that we all face. And I also had enough awareness to know how long this universe had been here, how brief and, you know, within 250 years, nobody is going to know anything about you. So even today, for example, we see more and more humanist funerals where people talk about people living on through other people’s memories and stuff, and it’s really a sham. I knew that life itself ultimately was absurd because, relative to what we know about time and the universe, our lives are just a grain of sand. So therefore very quickly, growing up, as a teenager and then especially when I got to university, I found no desire or enthusiasm or anything. All I lived for were the things that gave me immediate pleasures. So I went to university just to play sport. And I never did anything. I never did any studies whatsoever. I basically lied and cheated my way through just to manage to get through university. And just lived a very hedonistic lifestyle. And to me it was just obvious. Why would you bother to do anything else? So it was just an obvious reality to you. You’ve painted quite a picture. I think we understand where you were and the way you were living and what you were thinking. Walk me a little bit farther along and tell me what began to change for you. Or what opened you to the possibility that God exists or something might be different than you thought it was? So, in a way, my conversion if you like, or my testimony, is a story of three prayers, in a sense, and it’s the story of two women and three prayers, okay? What happened was… When I was at university, so I was about 20, 21 at the time. Bizarrely, I made this—and I remember these things very clearly in my head—I made a bizarre transactional bargain with inverted commas, big inverted commas, God, right? And this sounds bizarre, and it was, because I didn’t believe there was a God, but I basically made this prayer one day. No, there’s no way I’d call it a prayer. It was a bargain, but let’s just say… And it was basically… I saw this female that I desired, right? And she was with somebody else. And I was with somebody else. And I basically said, and this reflects a lot of what I was like at the time… Anyway, I won’t… I said, “God, if You’re real, if You’ll give me this girl, I promise You I’ll be faithful to her,” and then a little while later, we got together. Now, we were together for about two years, and I was a lot better. I think, for a while, I could genuinely feel I was happy. And this was a really fine individual. Have you heard of the Alpha course in America? Yes, yes, I have heard. But for those who haven’t heard of it, why don’t you tell us what that is. So the Alpha course is something that originated from a place called HTB Church in England, in London. A big church in England. And a guy called Nicky Gumble took on this course, which basically was a way of introducing people to Christianity and exploring questions of life through the lens of Christianity and Jesus Christ basically. And it’s basically become a global, worldwide phenomenon, this course, and it’s superb. So this lady that I was with at the time. Her name’s Jeanette. She went on an Alpha course, and to cut a long story short, she became a Christian, and she wanted to live like one, and although… So basically, when I say she wanted to live like one, it meant she no longer wanted to have sex before marriage, if I’m being blunt. Yes. This wasn’t really ideal for me, and I know that basically she was just waiting for me to propose and to marry her, and I didn’t do that. What I did was I basically tried to crush her faith. I thought, “How can you choose this mystical, bizarre God that you’ve sort of invented or that’s just been from this strange course that you’ve been on… How can you choose this bizarre God over me?” And so I was angry, and basically, I broke her heart. And I really broke her heart. And I was, in a way, trying to break her faith as a means of revenge for her betrayal, because she chose this nonsense mystical God over me. Eventually, everything I say will relate to each other. So just stay with me. Oh, absolutely. I thought I was going to be free, so as I did this, I was also aware that I was breaking my own agreement agreement with God. So, rather than marry her and this stick to this bizarre agreement I’d made with inverted commas God, this bargain, this higher power that I tried to make the strange bargain with, I thought, “Stuff You, stuff her, stuff this stupid superstitious nonsense! I’m going to go back and live for myself,” and so, in a sense, I betrayed this agreement I’d made with God. I’d obviously betrayed her in that sense. Because I was trying to crush her spirit and crush this newfound faith. I thought I’d find some more freedom. I thought I’d go back and find a sense of freedom, and I just threw myself into a major hedonistic lifestyle, far more than ever before. I really was living by the week, by the day, on a cocktail of drink, drugs, etc.  Conquests. I was a serving police officer at the time, but I was going out most nights of the week with pockets full of this, that, and other. And it really was… yeah. Drink, drugs, sexual conquests with absolutely no regard to who I was hurting along the way. It was the optimum of rebellion. Now, a few years of living like this, I then met another girl, funny enough on a dating site. It probably won’t surprise you to know I was on a few of them, but… To cut a long story short, a whirlwind romance basically began. This was someone who lived in Wales. But we kind of started meeting online and then, within a year, she moved down to London to live with me. So many things about this relationship had been out of my control. How we met online was bizarre. It’s because she liked my screen name, Jamie. That’s not even my real name. I mean I could go on with lots of other just weird things, but it was a whirlwind romance. Now within a year, she became ill, weirdly ill, and she then took a blood test, and the blood test showed that she was HIV positive. Oh, my. She had the AIDS virus. Bear in mind, this is getting on towards twenty years ago, so even twenty years ago, it was a lot more of a death sentence than it hopefully is today for most people. But from what I knew about her and what I obviously knew about me, it was clear that I must have given this to her, that she couldn’t have got it any other way than from me. So she was and is an amazing woman, and I remember the days really well. I was suddenly faced with this knowledge that I’d killed her, you know? To me, it was like I’d killed her, and I remember the night when I was sobbing uncontrollably, crying uncontrollably on her shoulder, and she was consoling me. Which says a lot about her. Yes. She seemed more okay with it than I was. I just couldn’t handle it that I felt like I’d killed her. And all because of my reckless, self destructive, selfish hedonism. Now… Then I prayed. I remember that night when I really, really prayed. I remember it like it was yesterday. And basically I really prayed, totally different to the stupid juvenile bargaining that was just a pretense before. This time, I really cried out to God. I really cried out. Basically praying, “I deserve this. Take me. But please, somehow, if You can, spare her. Because she doesn’t deserve this. She doesn’t deserve this. Please, just take me.” So it was so different in my heart, and I was literally crying as I was praying this to God. And a week later… They double check these things. A week later, she did another blood test, and she was clear. Really? Yeah. And it was incredible. And obviously I then took a test, and I was clear. Gone. Oh, my goodness! So I presume you attributed that to an answered prayer? Very easily. I don’t know… I won’t know this side of heaven. I won’t know in this world. Back then, the medics obviously say, “Well, we don’t really know what happened. For some reason, it must have been a false positive before. We can’t really explain.” That’s all they can say. But yes. To answer your question, I do believe that was an answered prayer. Because I believe either God performed some sort of a healing miracle, or I believe that God manipulated those tests as His means of doing business with me. Humbling you. Yes. We’re both Christians now. On the day she got this all-clear result, I proposed to her that very day, and we’ve been married ever since. So this girl is your wife! Yeah. Oh, my. Okay. And there’s been loads of other stuff. Sorry, I’ll go off on lots of tangents. But just to say that God has answered prayer in other extraordinary ways. Just to give you a quick flavor. Yes. We had something like… So my wife. Melissa’s her name. She’s got a daughter, Bronwyn, and she wanted me to be her dad when she met. She was five. She is now nearly 24. But we were trying to give Bronnie a sibling for years, and Lissa had multiple miscarriages. She had had an ectopic pregnancy. She had pre-cancer cells and was advised in her early twenties to have a hysterectomy. Her mum had a hysterectomy at 29. But she felt God was telling her not to do that. And then I had my own issues. I swear to you, this is no exaggeration. I had lots of tests done because we were investigated, both of us, for fertility and trying to see how we could… We were about to have IVF treatment. Three weeks after I was given a test result where I was given a zero percent chance of fertility, we conceived Maddy, who’s now eleven. Another false positive and/or miracle! Answered prayer. I hadn’t thought of it like that. For that, lots of people prayed for. At that point, I’ve skipped forward many years, and there’s various things to say in between, but all of our church were praying for us over those years of infertility, and to me, that was… Because I had the evidence of the test, and then we worked out when we must have conceived, and it was three weeks after I had had that test result. Again, lots of people had been praying for us. That’s just to give you another. Wow! Just to kind of go back to my initial conversion, there’s lots to say about the other things where God was prompting me and how I came to investigate the truths of Christianity and the faith. I mentioned the first girl, Jeanette, because, on the night I was baptized, which I think was 2008, 2009, I managed to trace her. And I was over the moon because I traced her probably by Facebook, and I hadn’t crushed her faith. Far from it. She was living a wonderful Christian life, wonderful family life she had in Australia, both of whom have been in ministry in different parts, both her and her husband have been in ministry in different ways. She’s got a lovely family. And I had to ask her whether she ever prayed for me, and I never forget her answer. She just said, “I prayed for you many, many, many, many times.” She basically said she’d never stopped praying for me. Oh, wow. And you know I really hurt her. Right. And so the joy I have from the testimony certainly is… This is why I’m convinced God was answering prayer. God heard my desperate prayer, but she had been praying for me, and it’s her prayers for me that I’m convinced He answered. Yes, yes. Because so many things had to happen that were completely beyond my control. Right. So I’m one of these people… Yeah, I think a lot of might feel this. But I’m fairly confident God, for many reasons—I can’t give you all the reasons—but for many reasons, I’m convinced that God brought me and my wife Melissa together as part of the answer to the prayer. Because Melissa was involved in choosing where we were going to live, and she wanted to start going to a church, trying going to a church. Basically, she’d been brought up as a Roman Catholic, but the worst sort of childhood, she had. I mean the worst. It was her influence… She started looking at local churches, and the only reason I ever walked into a church was because, in our nearest church—bear in mind we were now living in a place called Loughton in Essex. Again, she was integral to where we were living. And then, as we were looking at local churches online, I noticed that the minister of one of the nearest ones was a man who’s name was Alan Comfort, and he used to play football, soccer. Soccer, you call it in America. In a professional team that was fairly local to where I grew up in London. He used to play for a team called Leyton Orient, which was a sort of lowly but still professional level, and he was one of the best players, so sort of a minor superstar of football where I grew up had now bizarrely become… was now this vicar of this local church. And I was absolutely intrigued, and it was that factor that got me to walk into a church the first time. So in an extraordinary way, I suppose… I never really thought about it like this, actually, but at the beginning, at the very start, I mentioned I grew up in a home in a home that was obsessed by sport, and in a sense, I think God used that obsession to get me to walk into a church, and it was a sportsman that God dangled in front of me to get me to walk through a church door. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. Yeah. So we went there. And Alan spoke very well, and so I kept going back. And then, of course, eventually I did an Alpha course. Go on, Jana. Sorry. Oh, I was just… So when you decided to step foot in a church, how much later was that? When was that relative to that moment where you felt like your prayer was answered and both your and her blood tests were clear? So you had that moment of relief and perhaps maybe a little belief. So how much time passed between those two things? Yeah. Definitely that moment was the most incredible moment in that series of events, and so my journey really definitely started there, beyond my complete rebellion of God before that in various ways, so that… We were married in 2004, so it would have been 2003? So, as I say, it was a fairly whirlwind romance, but 2002-2003 was when we’d gone through these events with the HIV. And then we got married 2004, and so we would have moved to Loughton within a couple of years after that, so I probably first walked into a church—I wish I knew the exact date or year. But it would have been 2005, 2006. So after that moment of the sense that prayer was answered, did that open you towards the possibility of a real God existing? Yes. So that by the time you got to a place where you’re willing to walk in a church door, you would consider yourself open towards that possibility? For walking into that possibility? Definitely. Definitely. Certainly in my case it takes to the point of despair. I remember that day of crying out to God like it was yesterday. I still struggle to talk about it without welling up. God knows us better than we know ourselves, don’t we. It was in that moment of despair when I knew nothing else but to reach out earnestly and honestly, desperately, to God. And that was real when I did it, and yet everything in my life up to that was no belief, thinking it was a fantasy and nonsense, but actually… I don’t know. Something happens when we are faced with the most profound things, especially when we’re desperate. That instinct, I think, that little glimmer doesn’t go from ourselves. Sorry, Jana. Sorry. No, no. It’s really a- I’ve lost my thread again. I took myself back to that night. No, no, no. Okay. Going back to your question, so yes, feeling that something extraordinary had happened, that I’d cried out from the bottom of my soul to my creator God, and he answered me. Yes. Without question. I never would’ve walked into a church. I wouldn’t have walked into a church, I don’t think, had any of those things not happened. So I was open. I didn’t pour scorn on the fact that my wife wanted to go to church and was asking me to go with her. I wasn’t scornful and like let’s be antagonistic or worse. I was open to it. And then the cherry on the top was the fact that it was a surreal thing about who actually was the vicar of this one particular church. So yes. My heart had already been slightly softened by these extraordinary events that did make me more open to go, and so I did go with ears far more open to hearing than I probably otherwise would’ve done. And then what did you hear when you started listening? Funny enough, the first time, I remember fairly confidently again that Alan was speaking on revelation, and it was fascinating, and he spoke well, and so I wanted to go back, and I kept going back, and then eventually, they were running an Alpha course, and I… It’s funny now, as a vicar. So much of my planning and what we’re trying to do is get people to the place where we can invite them to Alpha and they’ll actually think seriously about it and come. I remember I asked Alan if I could go to Alpha. I was the one. My heart was softened enough and I’d heard enough to know I wanted to do this and look at this properly. But there were other little triggers as well. For example, I remember this: This was a significant thing for me. In 2006, I was channel hopping when I came across a documentary. Again, I just feel this was… I remember it so vividly, and I feel it was a… We now would call it a God-incidence, and there are so many that have happened. But I came across a documentary whilst channel hopping, and it was called “God: The Root of All Evil,” and it was Richard Dawkins at the height of his… on the back of his The God Delusion book. Right. And he made this documentary. So he was very popular at the time. Funnily enough, it was in that documentary, I think, that Peter Atkins that I mentioned earlier was just saying that anybody who believes in God is stupid. But this shook me. This was another sort of pivotal moment when I realized that, actually, whether Richard Dawkins is speaking the truth or not is the most important thing in the world. It is the most important question for any of us, whether God exists or not. And I’d always, without thinking through things, lived in an apathy of, “Why bother?” This documentary totally shook me out of my apathy. On the back, yes, what had happened in the previous years. Now, it was clear to me. This is the most important question of all. Now I’ve been an investigator all my life. I’d worked in law. I’d been a policeman. I love reading Jim Warner Wallace now, for example. I’ve been a policeman and then working criminal defense, so I’ve been around the law and investigations all my life. And so it seemed just natural to me—it still is—to investigate the God question, if I can put it like that. And that’s never left me. And so, for me, at that point, it was, “Hang on a minute.” I’m a truth seeker before I’m anything else. Even before. If anybody asks me why I’m a Christian, I could go into all the details of what God’s done in my life and answered prayer. But the other side of the coin. I mentioned two sides of the coin before. The other side of the coin is quite simply because it’s true. I’m a Christian because it’s true. Not for any other reason. It’s classic C.S. Lewis stuff. It took a Richard Dawkins documentary, and I also then read The God Delusion, and it took him to make me realize that, great C.S. Lewis stuff, the truth of Christianity cannot be [UNKNOWN 39:01]. I think C.S. Lewis—I love some of his stuff. It’s either the biggest humbug—or whatever he calls it—or it is the most important thing to know. One thing it can’t be is moderately important. Right. And from that moment onward, in 2006, I’ve always absolutely profoundly believed that. Yeah, similarly with Jesus Christ. The person of Jesus Christ is central. One thing He cannot be is—again paraphrasing Lewis. He cannot be a good teacher or anything patronizing like that, I think he says. He’s either severely deluded, the devil of hell or worse, or He is the Son of God. And actually… yeah. Even before I’d read any Lewis, the awareness of that question just suddenly hit me. One could say, from how I’d grown up, I slowly but surely became pleasantly surprised. Not only is it true, but it’s… We have an abundance of evidence for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As I’m sure you know. You know, I started reading—as I was doing Alpha… So from Richard Dawkins, I set out to conduct my own investigation, and the first place I went to was Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ. Fabulous. And in the last year or so as a church, the Hollywood movie adaptation of The Case for Christ, we’ve had film nights, and it’s gone through the whole congregation, and actually, I think they’ve done a pretty good job with that. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. Yes, I have. Twice. Yeah. And I’ve got to get my dad to watch it, but people I watch it with, I do say to them, “Watch this because I really related to Lee Strobel in many ways.” He doesn’t hide the fact that he was a drinker in the film and antagonistic and all those things. I feel… Humbled doesn’t cut it. But humbled to think that God—and this is what I wrestled with for a while, actually—is why would God do these things for me? I couldn’t get my head around it until I started to understand the depth and love of God because of what He’s done in Christ, and actually, He loves everybody to that degree. Yeah, through Lee Strobel, I then… That took me to people like William Lane Craig, who was a massive influence on me. For example, another pivotal thing was when I first… I think it was 2009 when I watched William Lane Craig debating Christopher Hitchens, and it was like, “This isn’t even a contest.” Christopher Hitchens, for all of his skilled rhetoric and clever wordplay, he had no answer to the conveyor belt of good argument and evidence that there is for Christianity. And that was just clear to me. And so Reasonable Faith, Bill Craig’s ministry, they run chapters, and I became qualified and a chapter director many years ago, and that’s always been a good feeding pool for me. He’s been a big influence. So obviously, over time and investigation, you became convinced that it was true, obviously existentially and spiritually you believed God was real. Yeah. So those things came together and you came to a place of belief. Yeah. I feel… to say humbled, that doesn’t… When I stop and think about it, it’s hard to get my head around, but in personal ways, God has been personal to me. My existential angst, the arguments and evidence, in every way, God has kind of met me through circumstances, through… He’s given me the means to know that He’s there. I think through Jesus Christ and the evidence that God has ordained to give us through the Bible, especially the New Testament. He’s given everyone access to sufficient evidence. I mean it’s like… It’s the Pascal stuff. I think God is… obviously. It sounds ridiculous to say this, but I think God is a genius, and I think God has so ordained this world to be an arena in which people… the human condition and the fallen nature of human beings gives them sufficient… whether that’s inner reasons or outer reasons… to stay rebelled from Him and to disbelieve Him and to reject Him in equal amount—Pascal mentioned this—has given sufficient amount for people to be able to find Him if they seek him. I think there’s an incredible balance about the way God has ordained things. Yes. He has. I love the way that Pascal talks about He gives us enough light in order to see but enough shadow if we want to hide and that sense of freedom and free will that He gives us. And it’s interesting to me that, once you had the eyes to see or the ears to hear, you began to see it in loads, like you said a conveyor belt of evidence. I like that turn of phrase. But it also… I think your life really speaks to… When you make the statement, whether or not God existed is the most important question of all, you not only took that for yourself, you actually took that for your own life in terms of helping others understand and answer that question. Because obviously you moved into a place where you’re doing this professionally! Tell me how you made that move. I mean, that’s quite a move, to move into the ministry. Tell me about that. It’s funny. I couldn’t tell you, Jana, when I became a Christian. So not one Damascus Road experience. An awful lot of things happened, as you can tell. So I can’t say when I became a Christian, but I know I was baptized in, I think, ’08 or ’09, so it’d been in the years preceding that. I can tell you that it was the 10th of January, 2013, that I felt God was calling me to go into full-time ministry. After a relatively sleepless night, I know it was that day because I wrote it down that day and I told my wife. And to me, it was just obvious. And it is. Although I’m still a wretched sinner, I’m a lot less of a sinner than I was, but it’s this… It’s C.S. Lewis stuff. To me, it’s just obvious. What is more important than God? And what is more important than God in Christ the way He’s revealed himself to us? To me, it just became clear, leading up and then that day. What else are you living for? In fact, again, off the top of my head now, actually, I’m joining the dots even now as I reflect. I grew up thinking, “What’s the point of anything in life?” to a certain degree. Meaningless, hopeless. No meaning, value, or hope ultimately. When you find the ultimate meaning and purpose and the foundation on which anything and everything has meaning, purpose, and value, what else are you going to do other than this? And that’s really how it was for me. It became a clear path to what you were called to do. And it sounds like you embraced that with both arms, just full hearted, and you never looked back. No! My struggle, if you will, the race I’m running. You know, we strive for the prize, Pauline-type stuff, is I just wish people could have… What is it that will give people that same awakening I’ve had? And on a superficial level, or a conscious level, I just think, “Why can’t other people see just how important this is?” Why can’t they see that it’s… entire destinies. All meaning. Their lives are meaningless unless there is a God. What can I do to help them see that they need to at least look into this stuff? What is it? And of course… because to me it’s obvious. Why wouldn’t you investigate Christianity? So I’m always desperately thinking through, “What is it we can do to try and get people to see that, how important at least the question is, so to spend some time exploring it.” And then, of course, even as I hear myself saying that, it’s, “Well actually, it took God to intervene significantly in my life for me to see that.” Hence, there lies in… you know? God’s grace. We need to be called by God himself and the Holy Spirit to at least… And a lot of people don’t like the term, but God’s prevenient grace. No one can come to the Father unless the Son calls him. We remain blind. A lot of the analogies from both the Old and New Testaments. We’re in a state of spiritual blindness, and we need God to do the things that will open our eyes and open our ears to see the significance and then move on from there. So really that’s why I’m in ministry. I’m fundamentally, if I were to label myself or people were to label me, they would say I’m an evangelist and apologist first. Because one of the most absurd things of the culture we live in and I’ve been living in is this idea that, “Oh, it’s true for you but not for me,” and I’m a firm believer in objective truth, as you can probably tell. Yes, yes. And so the truth of salvation in Jesus Christ… Obviously, there’s nothing more important than that. What can we do to get people to look into it. And so I’ve spent my life now trying to build relationships with people, trying to encourage people to be ambassadors for Christ, to care for others, to nurture community and relationships, so that you can get to a point where an invitation that is given to something like an Alpha course is not just going to be falling on deaf ears, but it will be given a fair hearing, and people talking about their faith will be given a fair hearing. Or the invitation to come to church or come to something like an Alpha course. They will receive it warmly because they’ll have received it from somebody that they’re already warm towards. I think that’s why I do what I do, to try and get others to similarly be the ambassadors for Christ in that way. Greg Koukl, another influencer… I used that phrase, ambassadors for Christ. I think that’s one of his phrases. It’s a good catch-all, apt term. Yes, it is. I think this is a really wonderful place to transition. If you were to be able to speak directly to a curious skeptic, or at least someone who’s raising an eyebrow or just willing to hear you out for just a moment, what would you tell the curious skeptic? Oh. I wish I’d prepared something in my mind for that question, but of course, I should be prepared. I’m always telling everybody else 1 Peter 3:15. I think it makes all the difference in the world. So I’d ask… Conversation will always be the way to go. What is it you’re looking for in your life? People don’t like thinking about their own mortality. I think people are aware of their own mortality. So is there more than this life? And I think there’s ways in which people can look inside themselves and outside themselves to find the truth and that it does lie in Jesus Christ. So depending on how the conversation would go, I would say look at the beginning of the universe. I’d say you can look at the fine tuning of the universe, again which points to a designer. The argument for mathematics. So these are all ways that people can look outside of themselves to look at… Actually, there’s a lot of good reasons to think there is a creator. Did I just say the argument for… yeah, the argument for mathematics would be another one, and how mathematics cohere in an extraordinary way with science in a reliable, predictable way. Again, that speaks to a creator. But then probably more important than those things, I would challenge any individual and say, you can look inside yourself to know the truth. Now, on one hand, when other people say that, I’m usually sort of skeptical. Because that’s a very modern Oprah-Winfrey-type, forgive me, sort of way of, “Oh, you can just find all truth within yourself.” But I would put it like this: When we talk about morality, for example, I think most people, when you start prodding and probing about questions of morality, various forms of the moral argument, realize they do subscribe, they do think some things are objectively wrong. There are certain objective moral values and duties that they think are actually real, that we’re not just products of animals and all moral values are ultimately relative and part of a delusion. So I think they can find within themselves that. Obviously, the moral argument speaks to there being a Creator God and ultimate lawgiver. Along with that, their sense of justice. most people can see there’s something wrong in the world. Most people wish and desire that there is some ultimate justice. And then the other thing, so the third thing, if you will, is the sense, the desire to be loved unconditionally. I think there are things that we can appeal to people within themselves speak profoundly… Most people, if they give themselves a chance to look at these things… So, for example, we all desire to be loved unconditionally unless something has gone very wrong. And it’s through these things that we can talk about Jesus Christ in particular. So you can see from the evidence beyond us and outside us that there’s plenty of evidence for a Creator God that governs this universe, but then we can talk about the person of Jesus Christ and say, “Look what happened on the cross. Here was a man who said, in various different ways, and showed in various different ways, who claimed in so many ways to be the God of the universe in the flesh, and He goes to a cross so that God’s justice is met. His perfect justice has to be served, if you will. The iniquities of us all are laid upon Him. But He does it because of his unconditional love.” So I’d love to say to anyone, when you look inside yourself and you know your sense of justice is real, that your desire for justice is real, your desire to be loved unconditionally is real, because they’re both a reflection of the Creator of the universe, and it just so happens that Creator God has come into this world to see that justice is served, but such is His love for you, that you know you have, because it reflects the love of your Creator, He went to the cross for you. Because He loves you unconditionally. So I think, on that personal existential level, within us as creatures, as human beings, we can get a sense and see… We feel and are made the way we are because we are made in God’s image, and we can see the nature of God, and in some way that is real. So even if nobody ever looks as cosmology or maths, just those things within themselves, they can see that they’re a reflection of a God that exists and loves them if they spend the time to then look at the man, the God-Man, the person and life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and just what that means. It sounds like you have given that a lot of thought. And it’s really- That’s pretty wonderful. What about if you had a word for Christians in terms of how they actually think about or embody their own faith or how they might engage. You had said before, and I really appreciated that, that just relationally, being in relationship with people who don’t agree with you, so that there’s a warmth, a genuineness of relationship and openness for discussion about things, just like you were talking about to the skeptic. Yeah, sometimes I do like little trite phrases. A little trite phrase that I liked, it’s a truism. It’s, “People don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.” And I like that because one could risk—even as a Christian, one could risk over intellectualizing everything. I certainly can. Because that’s where I’m inclined. That’s my background, is investigation. Like Jesus Christ, sometimes I approach as if He’s just this amazing figure to kind of be unmasked, like in the New Testament, unmasking the Messianic secret or something. Sorry, I’m going off on a tangent. No, it’s fine. Where was I? But yeah I think… I’ve seen it. This is one of the things that I’ve seen in ministry that’s most wonderful, is people who aren’t like me at all, and they can’t get their head around arguments and evidence and all this stuff, but they can be the most winsome ambassadors for Christ, more than I can. Their gentleness and their love and just the Spirit working in them and through them could be far more, for want of a better phrase, magnetic than any dry argument that I might sometimes come out with. Care. So the trite phrase, care. Ultimately, we’re trying to be intentional about conversation, intentional about sharing our faith, showing our faith in the way we live, and being invitational. The amount of times I’ve seen statistics that say, “X, Y, Z people would think about coming to church if they were only invited.” This sort of thing. And it does begin with the culturing and nurturing of relationships. So let’s say an invitation to church is cold and dry. The invitation is only as good as the person that’s making the invitation. And I don’t mean a good person. What I mean is any invitation has got far more promise if the bond between the two people is strong. So there’s got to be a genuine sense of nurturing a relationship between the Christian and their neighbor, and their nonbelieving neighbor or those that are non-churched. And it can’t be faked. Do we, as Christians, truly love others. Obviously, we should, and obviously we are called. The great commission applies to all of us, Matthew 28. To always have a reason to give a defense for the hope that you have. But all these things and the way we go about evangelizing and sharing our faith, it’s got to come from a foundation of having built a relationship where the person that you’re engaging with knows you care, knows that you love them, and knows there’s something about your faith that has done something to you. That’s why we’re called to live it out. Does that make sense? Oh, it makes perfect sense. So again, for example, going back to Greg Koukl, I like the way he puts a lot of things. I mean obviously he’s one of the best in terms of conversational evangelism and apologetics. Tactics is always one of the first books I recommend to anybody. But he talks about we need more gardeners, and I like that. I just think we, as Christians… Before my time, if you like, before I was a Christian, I understand there was lots of calls for people to go through the sinner’s prayer and always get people to say that prayer and they’re saved, and I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think most of us are called just to sow seeds. I think, for every individual, God knows, obviously, how many seeds it will take for that person to be ready for the heart change and for the Spirit to be able to then convict them without being blocked, without that person living in rebellion. Now, for some people, it might be one seed, ten seeds. It might be a hundred seeds. But I think if every Christian just works on being a gardener, as Greg Koukl would call it, just working out how they can keep sowing the seeds, I think that’s what we can all do. I think that’s perfect. You know, in sitting back, it has been such a pleasure to hear your story. Not only your story but your wisdom and your perspectives. I am struck by the paradox, or just the contrast of the selfish way that you used to live, the way that you were so frank and transparent about your life and how it is completely turned upside down, completely different. You’re living in virtually the opposite of selfish. You are completely selfless in giving your life in terms of helping others find their way to this life, to this God, to this Jesus Christ that you have found that has made all the difference. And I just want to thank you, Rob, again for coming on this podcast. It’s been truly amazing, and I just truly appreciate your time, and more than that, your generosity and your wisdom. So thank you so much for coming on. It’s been a real pleasure. Thanks ever so much, Jana. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Rob’s story. I’ve included all of the resources that he mentioned on the podcast in the episode notes for your reference. If you’ve got questions or feedback about this episode with Rob, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you’re enjoying the Side B Podcast, I’d appreciate it if you’d subscribe and share with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.