eX-skeptic

We hold beliefs for many different reasons.  In today’s episode Peter talks highlights the combination of motivations he had for disbelief as well as belief in God. 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 the story of a former atheist who changed their mind and came to believe in God. There are lots of reasons why we believe what we do. We don’t hold our beliefs in a vacuum. We’re not purely rational beings. Our beliefs are wrapped up in a story. A story of how we got here and why we believe the way we do. Sometimes we believe things because we think it’s the rational intellectual thing to do. Sometimes we believe things because it’s what our friends and family and culture believe. And other times we’ve decided on what we believe because of what we’ve experienced or perhaps what we feel. Still other times, we believe things just because we want them to be true. Most of the time, it’s a combination of a lot of different things, a lot of different motivations, memories, experiences, and desires, and you have to look in a lot of different directions to tease them all out, and oftentimes, you hear them when you hear someone’s story, when you hear them tell their story. Today, we’ll be talking with Peter Byrom, he’s a former atheist who came to Christian faith a few years ago. Welcome to the podcast, Peter. It’s great to have you on the show. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? Certainly, yes. And thank you. It’s really great to be on the show with you. So tell you about myself, where to begin with that? Well, I think, given what we’re going to be talking about today, it might be worth starting from university years, really. I graduated from the University of Kent, and that’s in Canterbury in England, United Kingdom, doing drama and theatre, of all things, and so that was things like sound design, performing classical texts, Shakespearean stuff, and multimedia theatre. And then, after that, after a fairly windy journey that I’m sure we’ll get to talking about, then went on to do things like video editing, graphic design, editing, including for a number of Christian ministries, and now I work for SPCK and IVP, who are Christian publishers, doing digital production and workflow and those sort of things, and I live with my wife in our children in the rural southeast of England. So that’s a quick summary of where I’ve come from over the last decade or so, let’s say. So, Peter, in setting the context for your story, I always like to understand about the place where you grew up and the people who surrounded you. Were there any religious references in your world? Well, I was raised in a Christian home, and I have and did have Christian parents, and so, yes, you could say that I started with those influences, and even around teenage years, I thought that I had a religious conversion experience and would’ve called myself a Christian then. I even went to the point of getting confirmed in the Church of England, I think, round about the time I was probably about 17 years old. So started with Christian influences, but they didn’t really last beyond leaving home. That was the key turning point there. It’s one thing to grow up with them, but when you leave the home and start doing your own thing, that’s when the real test begins of whether you really own those beliefs or not. So what happened when you left home? What was it that made you start to doubt your own Christian upbringing, your Christian faith and belief? I think, at the time, there was just… I think it was quite gradual. I think there was a sense of gradually thinking it didn’t make sense or that it didn’t fit my particular experiences or that it wasn’t particularly relevant. It just seemed to gradually be falling away into the background, and I think also the people I was associating with and the kind of experiences I wanted to have at the time had an effect. I mean, let’s be honest, if you’ve been brought up under your parents’ authority and then leave that authority, the idea of having a continuing authority over your life isn’t particularly attractive a lot of the time, and I think that’s how I saw it, which was, “This is my chance to do my own thing.” I think, more specifically, during my gap year and at university, the friends and the people that I mixed with, I think I very much became part of a culture that liked to think of itself as being quite expressive and sophisticated, because remember this is the arts and the drama, acting crowd, you know, and students in general, anyway, right? And it’s easy to get into conversations, and it’s easy to join in with people that might dismiss religious belief. I just have memories of being in the pub, having drinks with student friends of mine, and people casually attacking the Pope and saying, “Oh, he’s an idiot. He’s against condom distribution in Africa, and they’re all going to die of AIDS because of what he’s done.” All that kind of stuff. And then… I mean, there are all sorts of… I think there were a lot of cultural influences as well. Even just things like hanging out with people, listening to the late comedian Bill Hicks, who was hilarious but scathing as well and very, very critical of religion and institutions. And so, one way or another, I think just the general culture that I was mixing with, I came to see religious belief as something that was for close-minded people, simplistic people who were afraid of gray areas, of ambiguity, of exploring what it is to be human, and I saw the more secular, artistic world as being a better fit for that kind of stuff. So it just, I think it just gradually fell away into irrelevance in my own experience and my own thinking. So dismissing God seemed to be the attractive thing to do, the thing that just fit well with your world at university. Yeah. Yeah. It did. I think it did. And I think what then really started pushing it was then I was explicitly recommended, at the time, Richard Dawkins’ latest book. You know, the new book. You’ve got to cast your mind back to, I think we’re talking 2006 here. That’s when The God Delusion came out, and at least one friend of mine, he’d started as a Christian, and then he lost his faith, and he was recommending this book to me, saying, “You’ve got to read this. It’s brilliant! It’s amazing!” And this was actually the great new atheist, Dawkins, taking on religious belief and not just being content with saying, “Oh, well, you believe what you want, and I’ll believe what I want.” He actually went so far as to say, “No, this is wrong. It’s irrational. It’s harmful, and you should not believe it.” And that just really got me curious as well, and so then I just started reading and looking into the New Atheists, Dawkins, Hitchens, and those people. So I think it was partly the culture I was mixing with, but then eventually it became explicitly being recommended the New Atheists’ books. So then it really became a combination of a lot of things. Just Christianity wasn’t attractive. It wasn’t relevant. You’re telling me, it wasn’t plausible. That it was really for the simpleminded person. Was it hard at all for you… I know this seems like a strange question, but was it hard, after being brought up as a Christian, believing in God, was it hard to let that go? I know sometimes you can just untick the God box and just live your life, but was there any kind of tension with that? It’s funny, really. I think, in terms of living the way that I was living and what I would say and do, it was easy to let go of it. Because I was doing a lot of things that you certainly wouldn’t associate with someone who held to Christian values and beliefs. It was very easy for me to just be behaving in all sorts of different ways. I think the interesting thing about being confronted with atheist books like Dawkins and Hitchens was that that’s when you have to be more conscious and more aware explicitly of the fact that you are challenging and denying these beliefs, and I think some bits of beliefs were harder to let go of than others. I mean, I wanted to really challenge the beliefs that I’d been brought up with, and I think a lot of the arguments that the New Atheists were giving, a lot of the evolutionary arguments, why Darwinism was meant to disprove God, and even just listing the atrocities of religious people and just the various arguments that they were making, I think they quite naturally started to replace whatever Christian beliefs that I’d started with. So I think it was… The best way I can describe it is that it was a very conscious process. I had to be very deliberate in denying the belief that I’d been brought up with. I had to remind myself consciously, “Remember, you are denying this.” “You are denying that there is a God,” or, “You are throwing this away.” And I wanted to. I definitely wanted to. I lost the attraction to it, but I was aware that it took a certain degree of effort in doing so, if that made sense. Yes, it would seem… Especially if you’re looking at things conscientiously, that there would be a sense of a subtle tension, at least in letting go of a long-held belief, but I guess, because like you said, you’re surrounded by people who are very like minded and that gave you permission to do what you wanted to do, so at this time where you were letting go of God and Christianity, what did you think Christianity was then, if it wasn’t real or true? I think at the time I probably would have characterized it quite harshly, and I probably would have put it as something for people who were afraid of the complexities of life and who were afraid of dying, who didn’t understand the evolutionary paradigm, who didn’t have philosophical sophistication. I think I probably just lumped it in with a general nature or an assumption about what it is to be a religious person, and it was very much about the people or the type of person that you needed to be. So I think it was very much just to do with, “Look, this is one of a number of different beliefs that people come up with, but ultimately it doesn’t hold water. There are religious people who do all sorts of stupid things, who contradict each other. If God existed, then they would be behaving a lot more coherently, sophisticatedly. Yeah, I think that there was a kind of snobbishness, I think. It was, “This is something for people who can’t handle the gray areas of life.” So Christians were just the type of person you did not want to be. So it makes me very curious about what it is that changed your mind to open the door to even consider being that kind of person again. What started you on that road? Yeah. Well, that’s the strange thing, because, you know, a moment ago I said that it was the likes of the new atheism and Dawkins and those people that really got me denying Christianity more and sort of fighting against it more and sort of reaffirming my thinking about wanting to get out of it. You could also say that it was actually Dawkins and those New Atheists, ironically, that actually started me on the route to becoming a Christian as well, which I’m sure they wouldn’t like that, but I think that is partly what happened. Because it was all about the debate being stirred up, about the questions being asked. I mean, for example, one of the big light bulb moments that I had when I was reading The God Delusion, for example, was, in that book, Dawkins defines faith as being belief without evidence or belief in spite of evidence, and he was saying, “Look, you should only believe things that have evidence for them.” And the very first time I read that, I completely bought that definition that he gave. Now, of course, I think that’s a totally false definition. It’s a caricature. But at the time, I bought that, and I sort of latched onto that principle and thought, “Yes, that makes sense. Of course. Why would I ever believe or accept anything for which I cannot say myself, ‘I have investigated this. I can point to a body of evidence.'” And it was one of those moments of making myself conscious of a process that seems to be obvious. It seems obvious that I ought to investigate things and find evidence for them, so that became what seemed to be the first ticket, if you like, to sort of getting rid of Christianity. Because I thought, at the time, “Well, if I just investigate this stuff, there will be no evidence. There will be nothing. It’ll all fall apart.” So in a way, I started by taking Dawkins’ recommendation, “Look for evidence,” and that led me onto the path of actually… I would watch debates on YouTube, I read various books, and I would talk to different people. Initially, they were Christians and religious people who were doing a really terrible job of debating against people like Dawkins and Hitchens, Sam Harris, the New Atheists. Really embarrassing, and I would be cheering for the New Atheists, you know? Defending science and reason against these religious bigots and idiots and that kind of stuff. And then gradually, though, that led me on to discover Christian apologetics, so that’s people like John Lennox, William Lane Craig, those sort of people, who had a much more robust set of arguments and a way of interacting on this issue. So it was really about discovering the debate. The other side of this, I should say briefly as well, is that, in terms of the people I was surrounded with, I mentioned already there was one friend who began as a Christian and then became an atheist and recommended that I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. At round about the same time, another of my best friends at university, who had not come from a religious background of any kind—I think he basically was an atheist to begin with—he then had a big conversion experience and became a Christian. And I was living with these two people. That was massively inconvenient. It would’ve been so much more convenient to just not have to be confronted with the reality of people becoming Christians and God working in their lives and to have that other side of the debate fleshed out in front of my face, it made me need to confront the issue. And I wasn’t just confronting it as a hobby or academically, reading books and watching debates, I was living with two people that were living this stuff out. So again it’s what you read and what you listen to, but it’s also who you’re with. Right. Did you have some lively debates with them? Did you all participate together in discussing these big issues? Oh, yeah. You bet. We absolutely did! Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is university, where there’s scarcely any boundaries on alcohol consumption or when the sensible time is to go to bed or whatever. You know. And there would be all sorts of things. And I would take different sides a lot of the time. I would begin being really, really hostile towards the Christian stuff, saying, “How can you believe this? Are you anti-gay?” All that kind of stuff. But then, things would emerge that were challenges for the atheist point of view as well, questions about the grounding of moral truths, for example, and can you strip away all of the history of the influences of Christianity on moral thought in Western culture and come up with your own foundation? All sorts of debates would go back and forth. Scientific debates, that kind of stuff. Yeah. We would lay into some really good debates and challenges among each other. So during these times of debates, would you say that you were open to another perspective? Or were you just adamant about atheism and weren’t really listening to the other challenges? That’s a really good question. I was really keen to hang in there and throw away the Christianity that I’d been brought up with, and at the time, I think there were lots and lots of holes in the Christian belief that didn’t make sense to me. There were things about the atheist view that seemed to make it a more comfortable default position. I think the turning point, for me, was… There’s a part of me that is quite attracted to defending the underdog or the victimized, and I think the way that religious people had been characterized, including by people like the New Atheists, was that they were the bigots, they were the crazy right wingers who wanted to destroy people’s liberties and that kind of stuff and enslave people under a theocracy and dismiss all the efforts of science and that kind of stuff. But I think the real change started happening was when I discovered the Christian apologetics. And I mean the really good ones, the ones that were philosophically, academically trained, and the one that I think really did stand out the most was William Lane Craig of Reasonable Faith. His debates were all over YouTube. There were all sorts of videos of him debating atheists and really putting up a very, very strong set of arguments, and then I would go to his website. I would read more of his materials, start listening to his podcasting, and gradually, I got the sense that, okay, if you really want evidence, and you’re meant to use reason and logic, it looks like he’s using it. He’s breaking down his arguments very clearly. He’s spelling out the different premises, you know premise one, premise two, conclusion, that sort of stuff. There was a way of him making his arguments vulnerable to criticism, in the sense that he articulated the arguments in such a clearly precise, logical fashion that it would be easier to attack and refute them than if it was just dressed up in rhetoric. So it was discovering the strength of the Christian academic apologetics, and then I started to perceive things differently, I think. It was when… One of the things there was Dawkins was persistently refusing to debate William Lane Craig. He debated all sorts of other religious people, but he was persistently running away from this. People were inviting him to do it, and he kept just making all sorts of excuses that were rather insulting, and I thought, “This doesn’t quite make sense, because I’ve started living my life on the principle of challenging ideas and looking for evidence, and yet it seems as though William Lane Craig is very well matched to have a really good discussion with Dawkins,” and yet Dawkins was just running away from it. And there is actually… The funny thing here is, around 2009, actually, I attended a debate that Dawkins was speaking at. It was called, “Is Atheism the New Fundamentalism?” And in that debate, Richard Harries, Lord Harries, had stood up and said that one of the characteristics of fundamentalism is that it never seeks out and attacks the strongest arguments of the opposition. It always tries to focus on the weakest ones, on the straw men, and that really made me think, “Okay, this is my opportunity, and it would be a relevant question to ask in this debate,” and so in the Q&A, when I got the microphone, I just asked Dawkins to his face, “Look, lots of people have been inviting you to debate William Lane Craig. You’ve repeatedly refused to do this. Why is this is not an example of what Lord Harries was just saying about the New Atheism or fundamentalists avoiding the strongest possible arguments for the opposition?” Now somebody took that clip, and they put it on YouTube, and I think it’s had about nearly 300,000 views to this day. It became a viral clip of Dawkins basically just, on video, dismissing William Lane Craig, saying he’s not worthy of his time, and the line that, of course, really went round the blogosphere was him just saying, “I’m busy!” “I’m too busy to debate this person,” you know, and just dismissing him. And that, I think, was the turning point. There was a sense of disappointment with Dawkins that didn’t fit the regard that I’d held him in until that point. Something started to look like New Atheism was intellectually weaker than the kind of stuff that people like William Lane Craig were offering. That was probably quite a revelation to you, to find that, going into this search for evidence, you presumed that the substance and the strength was within the naturalistic worldview, but that’s not what you found. The more you searched, the more you found strength in the Christian worldview and weakness in the atheistic worldview. I bet that was disappointing, to find Dawkins in that kind of a sensed retreat of sorts to the challenge of debate from William Lane Craig. It was. Yeah. I mean, you’ve got to be careful at this point. Obviously, Dawkins refusing to debate doesn’t mean that atheism is false, but it, nonetheless, was one of those things that shook me up, into asking, “Well, why would he refuse? I’d better look at this more closely,” and it spurred me on to look at it more closely. And when I saw the critiques that William Lane Craig was making of The God Delusion, and indeed when I saw him debate Christopher Hitchens. I mean Christopher Hitchens was my favorite New Atheist of all of them. He was just an incredible character. But when pitted against somebody with really good philosophical training, who really knew the arguments, he turned out to be very weak when they had their debate at Biola University. That was also 2009, I think. And so it opened up all those questions about, look, okay, what do you do with the fact that the universe had an absolute beginning? Does that logically deduce that it has to have a cause which is transcendent and would actually have all the characteristics that we describe as God? What do you do with the fine tuning of the universe? What do you do with the apprehension of moral truths, or at least it seems as if there are moral truths. How do you account for those? And then, when you look at the historical evidence of the resurrection, how do you explain it? All of those arguments, it was becoming very uncomfortable, and I should say, as well, there were other arguments about the nature of what it means to even be able to have rational thought in a universe that’s purely governed by mechanical physical processes as well. All of those things. It was becoming very uncomfortable, how the more that those kind of arguments were investigated and those questions were probed, the weaker the atheistic worldview appeared to be under that scrutiny. I’d hoped that it would come out head and shoulders above Christianity. Right. And I know that it would be somewhat disappointing or disheartening in some way. How long was this process of looking and searching and considering? If we say that it kicked off at the time of reading The God Delusion and consciously looking into this issue, which I guess that had to be around 2007, 2008. The whole process, I think, went on until round about 2011. So yeah, we’re talking, what? Must be somewhere in the region of around three to four years. I think gradually… I think what I need to say as well is that… I mean, this stuff, I’ve been characterizing it quite a lot as sort of intellectual argumentation and that kind of stuff, and that is an important part. It’s very big and it’s crucial. You have to use your mind on this stuff, and you have to be very, very inquiring and critical of all the different sides of the argument. But of course it’s never entirely 100% about the intellect or about the mind in that respect. It’s the whole person and everything else that’s going on with you in your life, whether that’s emotionally or in terms of your own agenda and your plans and your own desires. Because, at that time, I had very particular desires to live in certain ways, to embrace particular lifestyles, and I think I had to be shown that some of the more hedonistic ways of living that would be perhaps more licensed by a naturalistic worldview didn’t live up to what they were recommended and how they were promoted, really, so I think it was a mixture. As the intellectual side of it became stronger. That is to say the fewer arguments I had against Christianity and in favor of atheism, the less I could use intellectual objections like a kind of shield, so to speak. I couldn’t use them as an excuse for staying away from belief in God and Christianity. The more that the intellectual questions were being addressed and answered, the more exposing it was of the other reasons, perhaps, why I didn’t want to embrace this. Because it does mean that you move from a muddle of a universe where there’s no purpose, no design, which means you basically get to set your own course and just make up all your own rules and call the shots completely by yourself. It does mean that you end up moving an omnipotent, all-good, all-knowing God into the picture as an authority again. And that is something that, on it’s face… Yeah. Well, that was what put me off it in the first place, and so, to move back to that, it can’t just be about whether you’re intellectually convinced. There needs to be change happening emotionally as well, and I think that was going on, too, through various life experiences, while doing this investigating. So it is a bit of the whole person, like you say. I’m glad you brought that out, because belief is definitely more than just intellectual assent. When you essentially buy into a worldview, it affects not only your beliefs, but it affects all of your life. So how did you come to make that more total kind of conversion towards not only the truth of the Christian worldview intellectually but the truth of the Christian worldview for what it meant for your life? I think it was… Well near the end of university and having graduated from university, the choices that I was making were very foolish, frankly, and I wasn’t going on a good direction with what to do next. I got into a relationship that I really shouldn’t have got into at all, really, and that just put things down a very wrong path, where I could just see that a lot of these ways of living that I wanted to live wouldn’t work and wouldn’t stand up, and then actually, it’s funny. The more that you investigate the apologetics, you can start from arguments that are quite abstract and philosophical or scientific, but then gradually, you have to confront the identity of Jesus. You have to ultimately look at, “Okay, look. Who is He? What did He come to do?” And I think through the apologetics, listening to the podcasts and investigating that gradually, I was being exposed more to biblical content, understanding more about what it actually means to become a Christian. The actual change that that brings and the fact that it does mean that you end up embracing a totally different view of reality, which is that you are a sinner, you are guilty of all sorts of crimes and wrongdoing, but the penalty for that has been paid, and you get to live completely free of that in what would then be unconditional acceptance in God’s eyes, and it just as seems as though the alternative to that, every other alternative to that way of living, seems to be something where you have to be the one who achieves, you have to be the one who makes sure you never, ever, ever screw up. And that doesn’t just apply to other religions. That applies to other secular views as well. There’s a survival game being played out in atheistic views. Whether you’re a humanist or a nihilist or a social Darwinist or whatever you want to call it, there is still a burden of, “You have to make it. You mustn’t put a foot wrong,” whereas with Christianity, that was the only thing that was actually saying, “No, it’s not about what you do. It’s about who you’re related to. What is your standing with God?” And I think the apprehension of that was making itself clearer in my mind as to what would be involved if I actually joined it and became a Christian. I think the real thing that really did push me over the edge, though… It was a gradual process. I think the strange thing that happened was that—I said that it took a number of years, so my allegiance was changing. I wasn’t a Dawkins fanboy or anything like that. I wasn’t a New Atheist supporter anymore. I think I probably intellectually was ready to become a Christian about a year before I actually converted. That comes back to what I was saying about the difference between the intellect and the deeper, more volitional things that go on within somebody. I got to the point of… It was 2011, and I’d got to know some people that were working on bringing William Lane Craig back to the UK to do a speaking and debating tour. These were people like Justin Brierley at Premier Radio, and there’s Dr. Peter May, who used to be the chair of UCCF, the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship. I got to know those people and that they were organizing to bring William Lane Craig back over to the UK, and I just found myself getting more and more involved with them and actually helping to try and sort of promote the tour. I was making videos and putting them on YouTube, sort of drawing attention to the fact that Bill Craig was coming to the UK to do speaking and debating, and this was around about the time as well that Dawkins’ refusal to debate was really kicking off. He’d already refused a number of years ago, but now four different organizations were inviting Dawkins to debate William Lane Craig. He was just refusing and throwing out all sorts of ad hominem excuses, and I was feeling let down, maybe even betrayed, I think, and conned almost at this point. And actually this great New Atheism just was a sham, really, the way I was looking at it. And so I was making videos that were probably more provocative than if I were making editing choices now, but… And putting them on YouTube, trying to sort of stir up the discussion about, “Will Dawkins debate Craig? Look at all the excuses for why he’s not doing it,” and sort of trying to add a little bit to the drama, I think, of what was going on, and they went viral as well, actually. They got shared quite a lot, videos like “William Lane Craig, Dawkins, and the Empty Chair,” those kind of things, and eventually doing things like helping to design the adaptation of a parody for a bus campaign that was advertising the event at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, where William Lane Craig was going to refute the arguments in The God Delusion, and Dawkins had been invited to attend that debate. This was in October 2011. He was invited to debate William Lane Craig, and when he refused, they said, “Look, what we will do is we’ll make it a lecture, where William Lane Craig will refute the main arguments in The God Delusion, and then he will interact with a panel of opponents. But I got involved, basically, in trying to promote that, and I think, in 2009, the British Humanist Association had made a bus campaign that said, “There’s probably no God. Now, stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Well, we flipped that round to say, “There’s probably no Dawkins. Now stop worry and enjoy October 25th at the Sheldonian Theatre.” Oh, my! So basically a bit of a dig… Basically saying, “Look there’s probably no Dawkins showing up to the debate. He’s not going to do it.” And this was also backed by at least one other atheist philosopher from Oxford, Dr. Daniel Kane, who’d published an article in the Telegraph as well, saying that, “Look, this could be interpreted as cowardice, Dawkins. Because you’re debating all sorts of other low-hanging fruit, but you’re not debating one of the most academically capable people here.” So I just got really involved. I made the graphics adaptation for that bus campaign, and they went around Oxford, and I think that got under Dawkins’ skin a fair bit, and he was publishing an attack article in The Guardian, and all of that was heating up, and I think we got to the point of the tour, where Bill Craig was over and doing his debating, and I think one of the last things that pushed me over the edge… Funnily enough, it was talking to his wife, Jan. Because she was incredibly welcoming and was just keen to understand a bit more about who I was and how I got to this point and why I had confronted Dawkins, and where am I now, you know? And I said, “Well, I guess I’m sort of agnostic,” and there was a point where she basically said, “Look, if you don’t think you could give up everything to follow Jesus, if you don’t think you could give your whole life to this, don’t do it.” That’s what she said. She said, “If you couldn’t actually really give everything to it, then actually you shouldn’t do it. That is what this is really about. It’s a total commitment and a total change,” and I think that was just one of the last things that I was mulling over. And it just got to the point, during that tour, where I just realized, “I think I believe this. Why am I not a Christian yet? I’m following this. I’m defending Christianity against atheism and all these arguments. I’ve not actually signed up to it yet, but I think I sort of have, anyway. I’ve sort of morphed into this Christian.” And so I think I just made that decision. It was October 19, I think. Yeah. I think that’s when it was. Of 2011. And I made that decision. It was in a bed and breakfast in Cambridge after William Lane Craig had been doing a response to Stephen Hawking’s book, The Grand Design, and also when Dawkins had published one of his biggest attack articles in The Guardian, trying to smear William Lane Craig for being morally unfit to debate and all those kind of things. I just got to that point of, “Nope. You’ve got to get on your knees and pray and just get on with it. You are a Christian, Pete. You can’t escape it now. This is what you’ve become.” So it was surprising to you, probably, in a way, but in another way, it was a very conscious… like you said, a very conscious, conscientious journey. It was a very thoughtful journey of exploration, of looking at both sides, of debating both sides, of listening to both sides of the issue, of thinking about what that might mean for your own life, and all of those things, but now, it’s been nine years since you’ve made that decision to go ahead and just believe. So how has your life been affected or changed? I know it was a morphing through that process. I would presume that that morphing continued in your maturity, as your understanding as a follower of Christ. Yes. It certainly has. When you start out, you know that something has changed, but there’s still a lot of stuff that still needs learning and discovering, and you discover a lot more about yourself in the process. And there’s also a lot of dependency on the help of other people and guidance from other Christians as well when it comes to your own being discipled and being taught. Yeah. That’s huge, really. And you’re right, it is about nine years. It’s been a very long trajectory. The way I would sum it up, I think, is I think I started my journey and coming into Christianity mostly through the head, in that kind of maybe academic, intellectual sense. I think it started there, and then it sort of reached the heart or the emotions or the more deeper part of my being afterwards. It sort of went from the outside in in that way. It’s extraordinary, really. It’s a real comparison to the life I was living before that, because it really should be said, the more that my conviction of the apologetics and the arguments for Christianity was going up, my personal life and the decisions that I was making in that very hedonistic lifestyle that was very much informed by that naturalistic model, sort of, “Eat, drink, be merry. Tomorrow we die,” that kind of stuff. I mean, that was plummeting. And I think that way of living had to collapse, and my own desperation, I think, had to be exposed as well. If you were drawing them on a graph, the academic or the apologetics conviction would be sort of on an upward curve, whereas my own personal situation, I think, was going down, and I had to basically restart my whole post-graduate life in terms of what do I do next? What job do I get? And that kind of stuff. So almost from scratch, really. It was a real restarting, and that just meant confronting all sorts of… I use the expression inner demons, but I think we can probably use that word metaphorically, but it’s been a huge trajectory of reconciling things with my parents and then getting a new journey of where to go with life from that point onward. I would say that the biggest transition was moving beyond apologetics into theology, in the sense of really needing to get good discipleship and biblical teaching. People like Tim Keller, for example, listening to his sermons, as well as the church that I was going to. It’s been a process of discovering more about myself, and I think the biggest journey has actually been one that took me into a whole different area of Christian ministry, so up until this point, it’s all been about apologetics. It’s all been about academic stuff. This was when I had to basically encounter biblical counseling. This is the sort of stuff that’s produced by CCEF in the United States or Biblical Counseling UK in this country, the United Kingdom. That was founded by the late David Powlison, and that’s all about how the truths of the Bible and the truths of what happens to somebody once they’re saved and once they’re in Christ, what that actually means for people and their own identity, and for living their life and for all sorts of issues, like anxiety, depression, addiction, and all those kinds of things. It’s a biblical model of counseling and psychotherapy, basically. The reason why I mention those sort of ministries, biblical counseling ministries, was that I’d moved to London and was freelancing, doing video and graphics work, at this point actually doing work to help Christian apologetics. Video, PowerPoint slide production for William Lane Craig’s debates, Premier Christian Radio, helping out with them, and I actually got into a time of acute anxiety, a ferocious battle with anxiety, and that was debilitating. It was extremely intense, and it got to the point where I actually started seeing a biblical counselor, somebody who was trained in taking the Bible and discipleship and applying it to what that means for people who are struggling with those sorts of things. And that was a big year of learning, a really big learning curve about myself, and growing a lot more in discipleship and understanding what it really means. If Christianity is true, if there really is a God who we are accountable to and we are morally guilty before, but yet He has made that escape route of coming down in the person of Christ and being that sacrifice, paying for the sins and the crimes that we have committed, so that we can actually be reconciled to God and be counted as one of his children, as if we were as totally perfect and blameless as Christ… If that’s really true, then that has all sorts of implications on the everyday life and on these kind of issues. And what I’ve basically learned from that was that I was just suffering from an acute perfectionism, massive, massive perfectionism, making me very controlling and sort of enslaved to that kind of illusory pressure of never… “I must never inconvenience people.” “I must never make mistakes.” That sort of stuff. “I need to be in complete control of what I’m doing. Otherwise, everything’s a disaster.” That sort of stuff. And that’s when the truths of the Christian worldview really hit home, when you learn that stuff, and you come to discover, no, actually, your identity does not sink or swim with your achievements, with mistakes that you make or successes that you have. You are not in control. You cannot be in control. God is the one who’s in control. It’s about what he wants to achieve, rather than what you want to achieve. And that God can use all sorts of things in your life, including suffering, to refine you and help you learn and even to bring you into a closer relationship with him. And so I think that’s been quite an astonishing trajectory. You said over this last 9 years. I’ve been learning so much more about myself and what my own inclinations are and actually learning that actually, if you grow in discipleship as a Christian and grow into what it really means to be in Christ, then actually the outlook is so much better. Even if you’re in bad life circumstances, what those circumstances mean for you is radically changed. And it truly is. It’s a new type of freedom. Because it means that, again, you’re not living for performance. You’re not living to justify yourself. You’re living for genuine relationship, whether that’s relationship with other people but ultimately God himself. And that means that the relationships that matter the most and your self identity cannot be destroyed by… well, death for a start. But it also can’t be destroyed by your failures or wrong choices. So that’s the existential, I think, significance. I’ve gone from accepting that it’s true to having that lived understanding, I think, of what it actually means for your life. It sounds like you’ve made an enormous transformation in your life, as you said, just going from your head to your heart to your life, and understanding who God is, who you are, and all the freedoms that come with that, even though it seems constraining from the outside, that when you are a Christian, you see actually it’s extremely liberating, because you’re living in the reality of an unconditional love and acceptance and belonging and an immensely valuable identity when you’re in God. So I think that there’s something paradoxical about that, something very ironic, and as you were looking from the outside as an atheist, seeing that belief in God was a control that you did not want and now it’s a control that you actually love because you see that it’s out of love for you that you live. And you live in an incredible freedom. Thank you for that vulnerability and that transparency, Peter. That’s quite amazing. Well, I think it’s… Well, you’re welcome. I think it’s important because I think the other thing that I’ve been learning as well, and it goes back to what I was saying before about, it’s never just intellectual. There are all these issues. I mean all that stuff I was saying about perfectionism. I mean that will have been true right the way back at the beginning of my university years or even earlier. All of that would’ve still been going on. That would’ve been part of my reasoning process or why I went one direction rather than the other, and I think that it’s the same for everybody. There are unlikely deeply, deeply personal issues that are always involved in this process, and I think… Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s certainly a mistake to say, “Oh, just have a simple faith and don’t think about this stuff. Don’t ask questions.” I mean that’s a lethal thing to do. If you live a life where you don’t question anything, and certainly if you want to be a Christian or whatever. I mean, if you just try and stick your fingers in your ears and don’t grapple with questions, all sorts of things are going to start falling apart at the slightest challenge, and it’s vital to do that. So I think the intellectual side needs to be included, but it’s never only about that. It’s the full dimension of what it is to be human really. The best summary I’ve heard is, my friend the philosopher, Peter S. Williams, describes it as it’s your head and your heart and your hands. It’s what’s going on in your thinking, whether that’s consciously or assumed, perhaps unconsciously, but then there’s the heart as well. What am I actually wanting and desiring? What are my passions? What’s driving me? Or conversely, what am I afraid of? There’s all of that going on, and then, with hands, it’s just, okay, what do you do? What are the actions that you then end up taking? It’s the interaction of all of those, I think. All of that is going on at any one time, with everyone I think. Again, it’s just beautiful to me how you have had such an intentionality towards not only searching for what is true and real and life giving but you’ve really made it your own, and you continue that discipling process, which is really critical in whatever stage you are. That we’re always looking towards growth and understanding. And I just appreciate that with you. In closing this today, Peter, because you have been on both sides of the fence, as it were, as an atheist and as a Christian, you understand it from the inside out, I’m looking for some advice as to what you would say to the skeptic, perhaps who, as you once did, had perhaps a very negative stereotype of Christianity but hadn’t taken time to take a closer look. What would you say to someone like that, who may be curious? Yeah. Well, it’s just fascinating to imagine and try and think of who might be listening to this and what it must sound like to them. I can remember being at university and being in a particular mindset where, unknowing to my friend, I’d snuck a copy of one of his sermons and was just listening to it on my MP3 player while I was out on a walk. And I heard one of them say something critical of one of the New Atheists, and I just got so angry, I think I was in a field, and I shouted and tried to tear down a tree branch or something. That’s one of my more turbulent moments, you know? So I do want to be very aware… And equally, there’ve been other times when it’s just been a pleasure to interact on these things and just have the discussion, in a very relaxed way. So I don’t want to make any assumptions about where people are in terms of their own journey. I think generally… What would I say to somebody who’s skeptical but may be curious about Christianity, belief in God? I think, by way of reassurance, I think I’d want to say I think we’re living in a time where views get very polarized, where it’s very easy to think that, because somebody is a member of one group or one set of something, that therefore a load of other characteristics must be true of them as well. So, for example, if someone’s a Christian, then they must be some kind of Bible-thumping, far-right-leaning,-Trump-voting person or whatever. Or if someone’s an atheist, then they must be some sort of horrible leftist heathen. You get all this just pathetic, really, really sad stuff, unfortunate stuff going on, where people just caricature people and put them in groups, and I think that an important thing to do is to really try and be careful about separating out what things really imply which. It’s not true, for example that, if someone’s a Christian, that therefore they’re necessarily going to be politically right wing, for example. There are people that are Christians that think that more socialistically ways of managing countries or societies work better, for example. It’s not true that the only people involved in the arts and performing worlds are secular. There are Christians involved there as well. I think the important thing to do is really just to be able to separate things out and enjoy the process of asking questions and inquiring about particular avenues of exploration. Asking questions about, you know, so when it comes to things like the historical question of whether Jesus existed, just engage with that as a question in its own right, you know? Who was Jesus? What are the arguments on both sides? What does it say about Him in terms of what He did, what He achieved, what’s documented? I think make a point of just trying to identify what the different points of view are and just try to explore them. I think asking questions is crucial. There’s not enough question asking going on at the moment. It’s always good, I think, to… If you find somebody with a different point of view, just keep asking them questions about it. Get them to unpack it and explain it in as much depth as you can get them to. Especially if it’s an argument or especially if it’s a disagreement. A lot of disagreements just fall flat on their face and turn into silly arguments where people are talking past each other because you think, “I have to jump up and basically be on the defensive immediately and tell the other person immediately that they’re wrong.” But actually, one of the most valuable things you can do, if only as a sort of recon exercise I suppose, is just keep asking people. So get them to clarify exactly what they mean. This is a great Koukl thing from Stand to Reason, his principle, which is get people to really spell out what do they actually mean by what they’re saying. Don’t just assume that you know what they mean when they use a particular word or talk about an issue. Check with them, what do you actually mean by that? So if somebody says something like, “I don’t believe in evolution.” If somebody actually says that, you need to ask them, “Well, what do you mean by that? What kind of evolution are you talking about? Are you talking about any change of any kind in the animal kingdom? Or are you talking about something different or what?” And conversely, if somebody says, I think the Bible is fairy tales. Again, ask them, “What do you mean by that? Do you think it’s untrue? Inaccurate?” And ask them for the evidence. It is actually, funnily enough, that Dawkins principle, which is ask them for the reasons about why they think what they think. So I think just be curious, I would say. Take individual lines of exploration and just question them. Do the questioning process. Get as much data as you can by being intrigued by the other person, and ask them to explain more of it to you. And I think that has to involve—it also has to involve questioning your own assumptions, though, as well. You’ve got to ask yourself, “Okay, what am I believing?” Or even, “What am I holding as most valuable to myself? And if there’s any logical train of thought going on here, what would the logical outcome of that train of thought be? Am I living consistently with things that I say I believe, or are there some holes there?” So I think just be curious. Ask loads of questions about specific issues instead of letting it fall prey to the polarization that we’re surrounded with in our culture. I think that’s fantastic advice all the way around. If there’s anything you would like to add even for the Christian. The Christian needs to learn to ask questions as well. But there’s always this… Seemingly, at least in culture today, there’s this cursory understanding and this misreading of Christianity, that it’s not good, it’s not true. Sometimes it’s earned and well deserved, and sometimes it’s unearned, but how would you speak to the Christian who is trying to present Christ in a positive way to those in culture who seem to misread? I think I’d say pretty much everything I’ve just said for the atheist. I think those apply as well, because equally, Christians can jump the gun and think that they need to jump in and be on the defensive or run away scared. Fight or flight, either of those two. And I think there needs to be… We need to really put our money where our mouth is in terms of showing that we’ve got the confidence. If this is true, if we really are saved and in the care and the wisdom of an all-powerful, all-good God, with a redemptive plan, who knows what He’s doing and is in control, then it just seems crazy, the idea that there would be any questions that would be something to be afraid of. I think actually… I mean, there was a poll conducted, I think it was a Gallup poll a number of years ago. This is something that the Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland was pointing out. He was saying that apparently the biggest reason why people left churches and left the faith was because they had questions that either nobody could answer or weren’t being taken seriously. They were just being given a superficial faith that wasn’t being exposed to the difficult questions and the challenging questions, because every difficult question and every challenging question is an opportunity to grow in more depth in your faith. I mean, think of it, if your faith is false, you’d better find out as soon as you can, so you can ditch it, get rid of it, or if it’s true, well then, it’s going to be an opportunity to grow even deeper in it. And so there has to be a real willingness to ask questions and expose ourselves to questions being asked of us. I think that’s very important. And I think when it comes to communicating Christ and engaging with people, again I think it’s the same stuff about you need to ask them questions, you need to find out where are they starting from. Don’t rush to assume that you know the person that you’re talking to or what their issues are or their questions are or even what the emotional baggage is. You need to take the time to get to know them and find out. Get to know… I mean why should we expect them to want to get to know us or get to know Christ if we’re not willing to get to know them? We have to show that we’re willing to engage. And I think that… Yeah, just take the time to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who doesn’t believe what you believe and just think, “How would I explain this? How would I explain what I believe in a way that doesn’t presuppose any particular special words or jargon or anything like that? And that can actually be understood by the other person?” And you’ve got to be able to find out where they’re beginning at and just see where to go from there. You shouldn’t pressure yourself to leap into, “Oh, I have to make sure I crowbar in a Bible verse and a really, really quick summary about Jesus and the atonement, so I can tick the box and say, ‘Look, I’ve been a good Christian. I’ve done my job. I’ve left them with a Bible verse. Now, the Holy Spirit will do everything else.'” Because that’s basically using… I mean it’s true the Holy Spirit uses our conversations. He uses God’s word. And He ultimately is the one that brings about the changes and brings people to faith, but you can’t use that as an excuse for not having a conversation where you actually want to try and help the other person understand something. The whole point of using words is that the understanding of what the word means is supposed to happen in the head of the person you’re talking to. It’s about what are you helping them to understand when they hear it? Rather than just words coming out of your mouth. So just take that time to understand where the other person’s coming from, and think, “How do I communicate in light of what’s going on with them?” That’s tremendous advice. I think we all need to step back and take time and listen seek towards understanding. That is just tremendous. Peter, thank you so much for being a part of this program, the Side B Podcast. I loved hearing your stories and your insights and your fabulous voice, your theatrical voice. You’ve given us so much to think about it, and it’s just been such a pleasure to hear you. Well, the university drama degree was good for helping me be clear on the podcast, I suppose. Yes. Definitely. I think, early on… I think I gave a definition of faith that was Dawkins’ definition. That he said that faith is believing in something for which there’s no evidence. I think the only thing I would just say to round it off is that now my understanding of faith is very, very different. It’s not that… When someone says I have faith or you have faith in God or whatever, it’s not saying, “I believe in something without any evidence.” The whole point of it is that you’re saying, “I believe in something because there is evidence, and I’ve made a judgment that that evidence is strong enough for me to trust it,” so that’s what I would say. Or you could look at it the way that C.S. Lewis put it, which is that faith is… I think he said that faith is holding to what your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods. I love that! Yeah. So by that, he’s actually saying… It doesn’t mean that you believe and commit to something without reason. It’s the opposite. It’s when everything about you, when your feelings are all over the place, you cling to the solid stuff, which actually is the reason and what you’ve learned and what you’ve experienced and what you have judged to be reliable. So if I say I have faith in a certain person, I don’t mean that I’ve just blindly never met them before and suddenly trust them. I have a ton of evidence about my experience with that person, and I say therefore I can trust them. Or if you’re getting on an airplane, for example, people sometimes say you have to have faith to go on an airplane. And I think that’s true. Because you need to have a good basis for trusting it. You’re not just going to step on any old piece of plywood. I mean, there is evidence to say that airplanes are generally very, very safe, and the risk of an accident is very, very low. You can’t guarantee that it won’t happen, but still you have to make the judgment call. Is there enough reason for me to step onto it and trust it? So I think that’s what I would say, which is… it’s not about committing to something because there’s no good reason. It’s because there is good reason, and that reason is strong enough for you to trust it, so it’s all about trusting and having a good basis for that trust. It’s very personal in that respect. Yes. We trust people, don’t we? And thank you so much for clarifying that. That’s extremely clarifying. Yeah, it’s extremely clarifying. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this new podcast with your friends and your social network. I would really appreciate it. For questions and feedback about this episode with Peter, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

In today’s episode author and scholar Dr. Carolyn Weber tells her story of moving from a busy place of survival to a place of contemplation at Oxford University.  There she met authentic Christians and was able to investigate Christianity on its own merits for the first time. You can find out more about Carolyn’s work and writing by visiting her website at www.carolynweber.com. If you’d like to read more about her story, Carolyn’s award-winning memoir describing her journeying from atheism to Christianity is  Surprised by Oxford (2011) https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Surprised+by+Oxford&ref=nb_sb_noss. And, her newly released book  Sex and the City of God (2020) explores what life looks like when we choose to love God first.  https://www.amazon.com/Sex-City-God-Memoir-Longing/dp/0830845852/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Sex+and+the+City+of+God&qid=1607450263&sr=8-1 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. We talk with people who have believed and embraced atheism as the best explanation for reality but then changed their minds and came to believe in Christianity. From childhood, our beliefs about God, whether or not he is real and what God might be like or not like, are often shaped by our family experience. It works both ways. Some families teach their children to believe in God. Some teach their children not to believe. And some just don’t talk about it at all. For others, their childhood experience of their family or perhaps with their father may shape the way they may or may not believe in God. Whatever the case may be, there are several different theories about if and whether a child’s relationship with their parents affects whether or not they’re drawn towards or away from God. In my research of over fifty former atheists, about one in every five rejected a God imaged as a heavenly father because of a negative or even a positive experience with their own earthly fathers. That wasn’t the only reason for their disbelief, but it was generally part of their narrative. Again, that was true for some but certainly not for all. Here, I believe it’s important to recognize that, although theories are out there regarding the nature of atheism and the reason for disbelief, it’s important not to broad brush an assumption about anyone before you actually listen to their story, and that’s what we’re going to do in our time together today. I’m so pleased to have on the podcast today Dr. Carolyn Weber. She’s a bestselling, award-winning author, speaker, Oxford University scholar, and literature professor. She’s also a former atheist who came to belief in God. Her book, Surprised by Oxford, talks about her journey from atheism to Christianity. It has won several literary distinctions, including the Grace Irwin Award, the largest award for Christian writing in Canada, and I must say, on a personal note, that Surprised by Oxford is truly an excellent piece of writing, beautifully crafted, a compelling story that’s just hard to put down, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly. She also has another book, her fourth, just being released called Sex and the City of God, and we will hear more about that today on the podcast as well. Welcome to the podcast, Carolyn. It’s great to have you on the show. Thank you so much, Jana, for having me here and for the very gracious introduction. As we’re getting started, Carolyn, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your new book that’s just being released. In a way, the title’s really quite serious, so it pokes fun at our culture, and many of us have heard of Sex and the City in terms of that notion of how we see sex in the media, but I wanted to contrast that with Augustine’s idea of the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, and how that really is the ultimate line in the sand of our citizenship. Which city do we belong to? Do we choose to belong to the City of Man and the temporal or do we choose to belong to the City of God and the eternal, and those cities are called to live in peace, as Augustine identifies in his famous work City of God, but they also have very different ends, and that kind of teleological difference makes all the difference, really, in the world. And so I wanted to set those two side by side and explore that concept in terms of how I’m trying to live that out and use personal story to look at relationships but also looking at how, when we choose to be citizens of the City of God and we’re extended grace and we receive that grace, we’re also married to Christ first, regardless of our relationship status. So it doesn’t matter if we’re single or married or whatnot according to the world, we’re married first to Christ and how are we ordering our love, as Augustine would say, according to that first love, that first commandment of what we love first. And so that intrigued me, bringing those kind of two, what might seem like very much a metaphysical conceit, actually kind of bringing them together and holding them together in that title and then exploring that throughout this new book. That sounds fascinating, Carolyn. I can’t wait to get my hands on it. Thank you. Yes. And much success to you there. But today, as you know, our focus is on story, on your story, on the story of your journey from atheism to Christianity, and I want to set that, as a literary professor and understanding the value of context, you’ll value this question, and that is: I want you to set the context for the story of your life. What context were you raised in that formed your atheism? What was your community? What was your culture? What did they think about God or religion or those kinds of things? Let’s kind of start broadly, and then we’ll narrow down to your family. So yes, I would’ve defined myself as agnostic, in that I couldn’t disprove God but I didn’t really believe in a god, and I didn’t have any sort of structure. I didn’t attend church, anything along those lines, and having grown up in a home with a father who had ended up being quite absent from my life, and when he did return, he was sometimes really violent or aggressive. My father had been a self-made man. He had grown up in a lot of poverty himself and had become quite successful, and then due to some circumstances in life, he lost that, and he really sort of lost his rudder and his sense of self, and he ended up having a significant breakdown as well, and so my mom largely raised us as a single mom, so I was also really hesitant about trusting fathers in general, let alone a Heavenly Father, and so that really also, I think, informed, as it does, that sense of trusting that kind of figure or wanting to explore that kind of figure. I had a lot more anger than I probably would have admitted to and nervousness about depending on anything or anyone other than myself. And in the sense that things could be achieved if I just worked hard enough, pushed hard enough, pushed through hard enough, things could be achieved, security or whatnot. And so, by the time I had gotten to college, I think I would be the perfect example of someone who had gone through twenty years of public education and had never cracked open a Bible, which I find really stunning. That we’re not taught it even as a book or as history. Right. And when I finally did read it, I was really amazed at it, actually, as a piece of literature and just as a story that unfolded from Genesis to Revelation. I couldn’t believe how intricately the story worked itself out, and as a lover of literature and a student of literature, I could see not only all the literary devices but also just how amazingly, beautifully put together this book was. Overall, but also in it’s phrasing, and that you just couldn’t make this stuff up. And once, I think, the gospel is planted, you can’t unhear it. Even if it really bothers you, it’s like this big elephant in the room, and so by the time I was approaching graduate studies, that door had been kind of knocked open for me, and I had this longing. I was studying world religions. I was studying world religions as part of my M.Phil. thesis, so I was looking at all sorts of different religions, but I was drawn more and more and more to Christianity because of really how unique it was and it’s emphasis on grace and this Bible that just blew me away when I finally read it cover to cover, that it was life changing. Wow. And I didn’t grow up with any of that. So, Caro, you’re telling me that the read the Bible for the first time when you went to college, and I want to get a little bit of a retrospective on that. What did you think the Bible was before you read it the first time? You said you had had very little exposure. Had you never been to church? Or your culture hadn’t introduced you to much about the content of the Bible or anything like that? Very much so. I had been to church on and off, a couple of times a year, Easter and Christmas or whatnot, as a child, and I tended… My grandparents that I was closest to were Hungarian, so I would actually go to a Catholic church, but all of the services, the Mass, were in Hungarian or Latin, so basically it was my sister and I sitting in a pew trying to stay awake until we got to the desserts. Oh my! Okay. I didn’t understand much. And I knew bits and pieces, I’d heard bits and pieces of scripture, like you would in maybe mainstream media even now, but I think so many of us cite scripture or hear it. We don’t really even know that it’s come from the Bible. I teach now secular students all the time that say that. And so there really wasn’t a lot of room for thinking faith questions. I was going to school, trying to get good grades. I was enjoying school. I was busy there. I was working several jobs to help support the family, which is also I think very common in North American culture, to be working a lot as well while you’re studying, and I felt like the first time I heard the gospel it was like I was a hummingbird that hit the glass hard. Kind of how I put it in my book was I had been so busy up until then that I had never really thought about who God was to me until someone posed that question to me. So you had very little exposure to the Bible. What did you think the Bible was? Or God or religion or Christianity? As an agnostic, what did you think it was? Was it just something made up by man to satisfy some kind of psychological or social longing or belonging? Well, for a long time, I didn’t really hold any sort of opinion either way. Religion didn’t seem relevant, and I think people are always drawn to, “How is Jesus relevant to me?” or, “How is faith even relevant to me?” As I got older, I guess my main exposure, Jana, would have been to just Christianity through the media, which is horrible! I sort of thought Christians were big haired TV evangelists who took your money. Right. And that you would make fun of. I didn’t grow up with Christian friends or knowing a lot of Christians. The few that I did at school seemed to be socially awkward or they seemed to make these life choices that seemed very, very alien to mainstream thought. I hadn’t ever really had someone articulate the gospel to me, and I always am amazed at that. I remember William Drummond saying, “Never give people a thimble of the gospel. Give them the whole thing,” and sometimes I think we hold back sharing the gospel because we think, “Oh, it’s going to sound ludicrous,” or, “I don’t want to alienate people,” or “They won’t be able to take it all in,” but that’s really quite condescending. Because I think the first time I just had it explained to me, just very objectively, I thought, “Wow! No one’s ever said that to me before. I’ve never actually thought about that as a viable truth that I can either roll around and accept or reject.” A lot of times, we think we know what Christianity is, but it’s this watered down or undiscussed or media version that really has nothing to do with the clarity of the gospel, and so it really wasn’t until I was in graduate studies and that had been presented to me, where I thought, “Oh, okay.” You know, the old liar, lunatic, or Lord, right? This is either crazy or this is ridiculous and unfathomable, or, “Wow, if this is true, I’ve got something I need to think through here.” And so I didn’t… in my upbringing, is anybody actually overtly trying to keep me away from faith or anything like that. I would have described my family as loving enough to get by, Jana, but broken enough not really to deserve God’s attention. And my mom had turned to drinking to manage a lot of her depression, and my father, as I said, was in and out of our lives, but you know, I was happy enough at school and I was close enough to my siblings, and I wouldn’t have described myself as really despondent or really joyful. Very, very busy as well. I think very sort of everyman. I’m open to all of our journeys and stories, but there was this longing, which was why I was drawn to that notion of longing in this last book I wrote. This longing, this desire for something. I guess later when I read Lewis’s description of it as sin-soaked, I was like, “Wow! That’s it.” This longing in us that’s human, and that’s why I studied the romantic writers. Before I became a Christian, I was even drawn to that period of writers in the 18th and 19th century that are drawn to the notion of infinite longing. That’s planted in us. That makes us very human. And as I began to explore Christianity more, it was definitely more in line with that longing and explained why I had that longing and fulfilled that longing, or pointed me towards why I had it. And so I would’ve said it was a long percolation. I was really resistant to the faith for a long time, too. Because I felt that… I think it’s very scary to think you don’t have control over something. Grace is a real leveler. It’s not karma, and it’s not something you can mete out or control or work hard enough for, and it blew apart all my categories of being self sufficient, particularly so as a child of my circumstances. And when you strip that away, it’s quite terrifying, really, to trust in that way and to also realize where we fall between sin and redemption, but I do remember reading Genesis and thinking, “Wow, this just makes sense.” The fallen world made complete sense when I looked around at me. And there were so many things in the Bible I was prepared to knock against them cognitively and to take them down intellectually, and yet, they rang really true. Not because I necessarily agreed with them but because I really could see the evidence for them around me and in me. So once you became open to the Bible and you were really taking it in, reading it, perhaps seeing what was in it for the first time with open eyes, and you stumbled upon Jesus and you stumbled upon the gospel, you say, can you, for those listeners who really don’t understand what the gospel is when you refer to that, could you perhaps talk a little bit about what the gospel is? I know you mentioned something with regard to grace but perhaps paint a clearer picture for those who don’t know the term. Oh, absolutely! Well, I didn’t know the term. I didn’t even know what the Old and New Testaments were. I had no idea how many books were in the Bible. All those kind of things. And I remember my grandmother praying and my grandmother talking about Jesus in Hungarian, so going back to that felt a bit like a homecoming, but the gospel itself just means the good news, which I thought at first sounded awfully condescending. How does somebody have the good news and that means I must have the bad? But to really understand, when I was asked the question, “Who is God to you?” I had never really thought about answering that question, and I love how invitational questions are, and it made me think who was God to me? And the gospel shows God as a being that is close to us, that cares for us, that loves us, somebody who’s entered into our state of being, who brings us the good news that we have been saved by Jesus coming and being here with us, by Jesus giving His life for us, that death is not the end, death is not all, that we have an eternal life and a whole life made for us, offered for us through grace, through God coming and dying for us and extending His life to us in that way. And to reconcile us for the ways that we can’t measure up, the ways that we can’t be perfect, can’t ever measure up to his holiness. And I was amazed at that kind of love. My grandmother’s favorite Bible verse. I mean, we didn’t talk about the Bible a lot, and she didn’t speak much English, but her favorite Bible verse was “Love one another.” Those were actually her dying words, and when I began to learn where those words came from and what they really meant, “Love one another as I have loved you,” I was blown away at what the gospel is. It is so different from any other religion. No other religion has this God that has fully entered into what it means to be human and every element of suffering and has died for us and walks with us and restores us to being whole with Him, and within all of creation and with the vastness of everything. And it’s really mind-blowing to hold that in one’s thought but also to know that it’s really also not complicated. It’s one of those paradoxes. It’s immensely complicated and mysterious and it’s not. And we can’t earn that grace. We can’t make that grace happen. It’s not in our control. It’s not ours to give. But it’s entirely ours to receive for having done nothing except believing that it’s being given to us and who’s giving it to us. And that’s incredible. And it changes everything. It gives you a whole different lens through which to see and hear. As someone, obviously again, a literary scholar who understands story, this is a wonderful story. It is good news, and you said that it rang true. It seemed to ring true to who you were in your human condition, but was there something more than an existential sense of felt truth about it? I mean, we’d all love to believe something that we want to be true or that sounds true. Did you do any investigation in terms of its historical veracity? Or how would you know that the story of this person of Jesus and the story of Jesus is actually true beyond just a story? Right. Or just a feeling. Or just a… Yeah. I mean I wouldn’t underestimate the power of knowing something is true in a way that you can’t quite explain the knowing, and that sounds like a cop-out, but I think that’s why it’s such a powerful word in the Bible, knowing, because I remember when I did first hear the gospel. It was like a little combination lock clicked on my heart and sort of clicked open, even though I never in a million years would have wanted to admit that. But I think that’s the reason why it does get people’s attention. People get their knickers in a knot over Jesus and no one else, really, to the same extent. If you want to get people’s attention, right, you say that name, and you know, people are mad or they’re joyful. It’s definitely the line-in-the-sand word and name. There’s no other name like it. And so there was something knowing about it, but I did do a lot of research. I was, at the time, researching world religions, and I was looking particularly at different theologies that were shaping 18th and 19th century British and European thought, so I was really interested in the development of the church, as well as other… I was actually working on metempsychosal and transmigration theory in the East because of how it was influencing this group and writers, and it did, it really threw into my face a lot of doctrine. I did read a lot. I really wanted to poke holes in it. I remember when I read Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, I thought he and I would’ve gotten along great on a bus ride. I was absolutely going to poke holes in it, and it irritated me, and the Christians I knew, they had something I wanted, but I also just really wanted to take them down. And I realized that that was coming from a place of great wounding for me, that if I really wanted to be objective and thoughtful here, actually much of the historical and biblical, let alone Holy Spirit, just leaving that element out, was very, very convicting around the faith. Ultimately, there is a leap. Ultimately, you can only reason yourself so far into a corner, and it does come to a leap of faith. There’s no way around that, but I think that that’s actually one of the most powerful and convicting things about Christianity, is that we can’t put God in a box. He won’t stay in it, and he doesn’t operate in that way, and we can’t even control how it all works, and there still is a supernatural element that defies our understanding. Yes, there certainly is. I find that actually quite convicting, intellectually convicting. They don’t have to be at opposite ends at all. There’s a lot to be said about believing wisely or spiritual thinking, and the two are not contradictory at all. A paradox is only a seeming contradiction, an apparent one, not a real one. And I’ve always found that the most powerful truths lie in those two being held together. And that’s really eventually what drew me to make that leap. It’s the difference between everything. You’ve said a couple of things I want to explore for just a moment. One thing that you inferred was that, when you were pushing back against Christians and Christianity, you were doing so because it was a place of great wounding for you, that you felt there was something that was causing you to push back. Can you… Or would you mind talking about that? The relationship between this push and perhaps whatever that was deep inside of you that didn’t want it to be true. You know, Jana, I actually think, deep inside of me, I wanted it to be true, and I just felt that that would be too dangerous to allow that to happen. In what way? In that this incredible love story that has been written for everyone in the world, and nobody is exempt from it, nobody’s beyond it, it doesn’t belong to just a certain group of people and it doesn’t just come through generation or adoption. It’s entirely open to everyone. It rang so true, and as I began to realize that it shaped my lens of thinking, that transformative thinking, that at first it was easy, for example, to think, “Oh, these crazy Christians. They’re touting chastity. They’re touting not sleeping with someone before you get married. And really how believable is that? And how practical is that? And have they never really been in a moment of temptation? And have they never really woken up and smelled the coffee, as to what needs to happen in this day and age?” and blah, blah, blah, and, as a feminist, you know, “We’re no longer property or chattel or anything along those lines,” completely unaware of a concept like my body being a temple. That had never been taught to me or shared with me or even discussed with me among friends that there might be something holy about my body, as well as Spirit-filled and connected, that there might be a larger design and a larger purpose and a larger plan that I was part of and all my decisions affected not only me but others in that, and that there was a tremendous beauty and responsibility and investment and the distinction between new wine and old wine, and the old wine tastes better because of what’s gone into aging and experience and wisdom. And our culture doesn’t… It gives us a lot of information but not much wisdom, and I think that that’s the big arc, the big journey between Eden and heaven, is experience and wisdom, the accumulation of wisdom, and as I began to think about, “Wow. What if I did think of my life as the Bible talks about? What if these things are true? What if my body is a temple? What if God wants me to be holy as He is holy? What if there’s actually something really beautiful and design filled and purposeful in that, as opposed to all these other messages that are really quite empty? What are the repercussions for me in that?” And I began to see that it had nothing to do with high-handed purity or the politics of the body or being chattel or any ways that the world has twisted things from the fall, which just makes so much sense. Obviously, the first sin to me just seems like consumerism. Yes. You know? Consumption of other. In terms of preferring the love of self. And I was really moved at that deep, deep love of God for us, that if we put it first, that helped us love ourselves and others, and it was transformative. Transforming your thinking. It was transformative. And it just seemed like, when you started to look at things from that access, I began to realize, “Wow! This is a different way of thinking. This is a different way of being.” We’re not taught this in schools. We don’t turn on the news, and it’s available. It’s often… If you don’t have Christian friends or Christian community, it’s not even talked about at all. But there is another way of being. And we talk about it, as Christians, as the way, Christ being the way, but it’s another way that isn’t often shown or talked about or discussed. And I was really amazed at how it made me really, truly see so many things differently. And that there’s a heart and mind and soul connection in all of that that no other path really shows or calls you to combine. So those really deep longings and those desires that you had early, you found as you were exploring Jesus and the Bible and the gospel, you found something that was true and good and beautiful and, like you say, life transforming. Something that would give you a very different way of thinking about your own life and the way that you live and the way that you understand it. Were there people… You’ve spoken about maybe dots or interactions with Christians throughout your upbringing, but did you enter into a time in your life, as you were exploring, where you actually encountered those Christians who embodied what you’re just speaking of, this other way of living, this different way of understanding life. Absolutely! I think those were the people that really drew me to the faith to begin with. Just like Hannah Whitall Smith said, the best testimony is living the Bible, is looking at your life as a living testimony, and being a lover of literature… I really think, Jana, that God speaks to us in our various love languages, that He knows are most beloved to us, and I love literature. I love words. And I remember reading the Bible, and there was just nowhere to hide. Every stripe of person is found in the Bible. Every stripe. And I remember reading the New Testament, too, and thinking, “Wow! Here’s the guy… He doesn’t have enough belief, and he’s praying for belief.” “Here is the person with immense belief, and he’s wanting someone healed on his behalf.” “Here’s a woman who’s bled for 12 years, and that’s being healed at the same time that Jesus is traveling to another girl, who’s 12 years old and about to enter the exact opposite time of her life.” It was just so intricate. There was something for everybody. Every type of person I knew, but also every type of person within myself, that I felt in scripture I kept meeting facets of myself in all of those people. And then, the “real people” I was meeting, I was meeting Christians who were willing… First of all, they were really good at asking questions. And I think questions are so important. They invite you to the table. Jesus uses them all the time. Parables and questions, stories and questions are so important. They’re so inviting. There’s lack of judgment. There’s opening of conversation. And I was moved by their genuine interest in hearing where I was at, what I was thinking, what I was longing for, instead of hitting me over the head, as I feared, from maybe what I had seen on television or whatnot, with trite phrases or rote swirls-for-eyes passages from the Bible. Yes. They were very real, genuine conversations. People who were really interested in meeting me where I was at, which is how Jesus is in when he interacts with people in the gospel. He never walks up to anybody and says, “You suck,” or, you know, “Pull your life together. Too bad you had a difficult childhood.” He doesn’t do that to anybody. He entirely meets them where they’re at, and I really had the blessing of meeting Christians who were, not perfect themselves, by any means—no one’s perfect. But they were inhabiting that, that were incarnating that essence of Christ in their conversations with me and in their welcoming of me to the table. And that really genuinely spoke to me. And it’s a very powerful thing to be met in the real. And Jesus is the real. Yes, He is, and to be met with people who actually live like they know Jesus and live like Jesus is in and through their lives, it can be surprising. Your book is called Surprised by Oxford. I presume a lot of these changes or revelations were happening as you were on that campus. Is that a place where you actually were able to move from this place of busyness and survival to a place of contemplation and study and pursuit? Exactly. On a very pragmatic level, I went from the very, very busy, typical North American student life of lots of spinning plates, with studies and with jobs and things, even more so with the background I came from of having to provide for my family and myself, and my father, as I said, had struggled with mental illness and had, as well, a lot of debt. A lot of financial pressures and concerns. I grew up with times of immense poverty, and I have a heart for students in that in that way. A lot of times, we don’t know what someone is facing when we meet them. We have no idea whether they’re hungry or not. We have no idea. And again, that’s where I love the Bible, the symbolism of poverty, all sorts of different forms of poverty, and I think, when I got to Oxford, for one, I wasn’t allowed to work.  And so I finally had this time, and at Oxford, they want you to have this time, to percolate your ideas and to make friendships, and I would go to tutorials, I would go to lectures, but then I would have time to go on a walk through a garden with a friend or go to a pub and talk about ideas, and there was much more of this contemplative, conversational lifestyle that was expected, and it was not just this elitism. It was actually considered very much part and parcel of studying, and it seemed very alien to me at first for a while. I actually felt really strange. I felt like I had all this time. I wasn’t running to these two or three jobs or everything else, but then you realize, “Wow! It’s actually this breathing space, about being still, and about thinking through your ideas, and actually thinking through why you’re here,” and a lot of that, we’re not allowed to do and it’s not cultivated. I think, actually, many powers that be in the fallen world would prefer that we don’t meditate and we don’t contemplate. And distraction is, I think one of the devil’s greatest tools, losing that traction. And I think being able to talk with people, people whose example I grew to trust more and more. They were really living their walk and talking their talk, and they were sincere and open, and the more I was reading and studying myself, it was a whole difficult experience than the harried white rabbit. Right. And it can sound idealized, but I think, actually, Christians, even in a very busy culture, know… We now know, we on the other side of the looking glass, now know that that’s actually a very important spiritual discipline to have in my own life, regardless of how busy it is. But when you’re coming from the other city, when you’re traveling from the City of Man towards the City of God, it’s a very alien thing to put aside time for devotional or time for scripture or to read hermeneutically or to pray. Those are not things that the greater fallen world teaches us to do or wants us to do. And so I think that shift was really life changing for thinking through. Because, for a while, I went through the cynicism, and I thought, “Oh, I’m sure I’m just being drawn to this Christianity because I’m now here, and I’ve got all this time to think this through, and isn’t this great? And when I actually go back to real life, it’s not going to be relevant at all.” Or is it a crutch? I was wary that it might be a crutch for things I had wanted in my life that had fallen through. And instead realizing, “Wow, those epics run deep.” Those mono myths that search for the father run really deep for a reason. Which is what led to this last book, writing it after losing my father, because I think our cosmos tilts when we lose our parents, regardless of our relationship with them. And it’s just… I think that having that chance to look at, in retrospect, those points of light and how God has been there for you or connected them for you, having the time… Not that you have to always be thinking or that it’s a crutch, but I began to see that it wasn’t a crutch at all. It was actually something I very much not only needed but would be nothing without. It was a total juxtaposition of your prior understanding and perspective of God, especially God as father. That’s quite amazing. So, along your journey, I guess all of these pieces started coming together. You were reading the Bible. And you found yourself in the scripture, that there was really nowhere to hide. You were finding truths about Jesus, about the historical nature of the Bible and how it’s not only historical, but it matches and meets every longing and desire of your heart, all of these things were coming together. You were meeting Christians who were embodying this authenticity, a life that was attractive, which was again just such a surprise, so you… I guess all of these threads started becoming woven together in a sense into a tapestry towards a place of belief. Was there like a tipping point in which you said, “Yes, I believe this is true, and I can’t go back”? I love your use of the word tapestry. Because very much so, I feel that’s how all our lives are, and you know, with a tapestry, the design is so beautiful and clear on the top, and then underneath you see all the knots and everything else. Yes. And the handiwork, right? The hard work that goes into it. Yes, I would say all those things worked together. A lot like Lewis. Feeling like, in some ways, a very reluctant convert, and yet, there is this moment… For me, there was a moment. I remember it was actually Valentine’s Day back in 1994, where I got to a point where I thought, “Okay, I’ve kicked against this.” I kicked against this, and it wasn’t necessarily that they were all intellectual answers, although many of them were. As I mentioned before, the Bible just makes common sense oftentimes, or even the things that are complicated or difficult, there’s a lot of practical feedback, but as an academic, I also get frustrated with people who denounce the Bible or drive around with their Darwin inside of their Christian fish bumper stickers, and they probably never cracked open a Bible. And I think, “You know, I’ve been like that, too,” so just read it. Just read it, cover to cover, and then see. At least you’ll have the fodder to make an argument. That’s probably the academic in me, you know. Know your sources and at least have read the book before you criticize it. But you might have something that you respond to or your heart responds to. But I think… Yeah, it eventually got to this point where, at least for me, there had been this slow recogning and reckoning, and a lot of things sort of graciously answered for me because my love language is words and literature and probably argumentation, even. But getting to a point where I thought, “Okay, is this true or is it not?” And I think it comes down to that point of light, Jana, a lot like… I’ll give you an example. One of the stories that really irked me in the Bible was the thief on the cross, when Jesus is crucified, and there’s a thief to his left and a thief to his right, and the one that denounces and the one that asks Him to remember him that day. And before I was a Christian, that story used to bug me like crazy. It drove me crazy, because I used to think, “Gosh! There’s that guy. He’s been a sinner his whole life. Now, he’s asking to be forgiven. What a jerk!” And of course I love him now, you know? Things are looking desperate, and he’s probably thinking, “I’ve got nothing to lose,” and Jesus is right next to him, and oh, my goodness! And I remember saying this to someone who had actually really articulated the gospel to me and was somebody that I very much cared for and respected their opinion, and I told them how much this story irked me, and he said to me, “Well, thank God for that story!” And I said, “What? Are you kidding me?” and he said, “No, absolutely thank God.” He goes, “We’re all that thief on that cross.” We don’t deserve it, and we can receive it at any time, but we never deserve it. And there’s that moment where you have to be accountable for your soul. No one else can be. You can’t slough off that responsibility. You don’t stand before God at the end of time and say, “Hey, what about him?” You know? And that’s when the penny dropped. I was like, “Wow! That’s personal relationship.” And not that it’s necessarily just heavy handed and… Phrases like “blessed assurance” used to bother me because it always appeared in a heavier font. Just all this stuff that Christians throw around that seems so trite and empty or canned, and I was like, “Wait a minute!” It’s like Shakespeare now. We all think, “Oh, everybody quotes Shakespeare,” but there’s actually such immense beauty in it. We’ve lost sight of it. We’re looking at the wrong side of the tapestry. And it seems threadbare to us and not relevant, and I do remember thinking, “You know, it’s game time. Do I say, ‘Remember me,’ or do I mock him?” Because that’s really the only two answers that there are. And even saying nothing isn’t going to be the truth and the grace that I desperately need and I know is there for the taking, and so I do remember, late at night on that evening, accepting the Lord. And all those phrases used to make me really uncomfortable. “Accepting the Lord as my Lord and Savior,” all those kind of phrases I would hear tossed around or used, but they’re really so deeply entrenched with meaning that sometimes I think all we can do is feel like we mock them because we’re so afraid of them, of what they might really mean if they’re true. And they change everything. Because they are true. And then I think there are times in our walk, our spiritual walk, where faith is a form of sacrifice. Obedience is a form of sacrifice. We choose to believe even when we feel empty or when we feel we can’t. We still put that on the altar, and He always blesses it. Like Lewis said, “The driest prayers please Him most.” The prayers from that really dry place are still forms of trusting. Well, it sounds like, in your life, everything has changed, and your place of trust is in Christ and that it is something that is not something to be afraid of but something to embrace, something that is life giving, that is true and good and beautiful and all of those things. You express it with such grace and with such wisdom. It’s obvious to me that you’ve been living in this, what you call the real, for a while. I hope we all are. I think that’s the wonderful thing about Jesus is you don’t know… I love the fact that we can pray for wisdom and it’s given to us, but that we can speak like this, Jana, as sisters in Christ, that there’s a whole other level of communication and understanding, and I think the big one for me is to know that I’m not alone. Even when I do feel very painfully alone, I know, as a Christian, I’m not. No matter what. And that makes all the difference. In a spiritual walk. It is. It’s an amazing gift. It is. This community of those who are, in Christ, as they say. As we’re kind of winding this down, it’s just been so rich. I wondered, Carolyn, since you are so wise, if you could. Gracious company goes a long way. Yes. If you could speak to perhaps a curious skeptic who might be listening to this podcast, who might find themselves where you were at one time in your life, skeptical, pushing back for whatever reason, what would you say to that person to encourage them to perhaps listen to the other side, to give Christianity a chance, to perhaps take a moment to actually consider those big issues, like you have. That is such a wonderful question. I mean almost, thinking what I would have said to myself years ago, is first to really sit with what is the reality of you being all? If you are all that there is, where is that getting you? How is that working for you? How will that always work for you? E.M. Forster has this wonderful line that says, “The reality of death kills a man, and the idea of death saves him,” and as Peter Kreeft says, “Life is fatal.” It’s fatal for every single person, and the great philosophical question is, “What happens to us when we die?” And I think it’s so easy for atheists or whatnot to say, “It doesn’t matter. Nothing happens. I’m gone,” but it’s so connected to so much more purpose. Not just this existential anxiety but so much more about our worthiness and our dignity and our being made for and in love and to love, and I would just sit with that question. What if it is all about me? And what if it begins and ends with me? Where does that leave me? And then what? And is that a reality that I want to ascribe to and believe in? Or is there another way? And if Jesus calls himself the way, what does that mean? And I would really challenge someone who hasn’t read the Bible to read it, to just read it. Even if they read it objectively, cynically, whatnot, read it. And there’ll be tough parts, and there’ll be boring bits and all sorts of things, but actually who knows what speaks to whom. Just read it. And see if you are unchanged by the end, which I highly doubt. Because I think we’re changed by everything we read. But once you hear the gospel, you can’t unhear it. And how is it going to sit with you? And then is that going to be a full rejection that you can package up and set aside? Or is there something there that you want to explore, that speaks to you, that you feel leads you to a more abundant life and death and life again? And will change the way that you love yourself and will change the way, dramatically, that you love others, even when you’re not in the mood and will have a place in an eternal story and purpose. That is so much bigger and more profound than our own little selves. And I think I would just challenge someone to do that. And not to have to do it in an overwhelming way, but just to give in to that longing. I’ve never met anyone, Jana… Just like I’ve never met a child who as an atheist, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t shaped by some sort of longing. Who didn’t long to be loved or long to be accepted or long to be cared for or long to matter. It’s the essence of every enduring work of literature, right? Everybody, like Harry Potter, wants to get the letter that says they’re special. Yes. Hence, that’s why I think the Bible is so full of missives, but there’s… Where does that longing point us? And I do agree with Augustine that it’s a longing that can only be fulfilled by God. It points us to God to be fulfilled by him. And that’s actually a really beautiful and freeing thing. It replaces terror and panic in the empty world with the fear and reverence of holiness in the eternal one. And it’s a different type of fear. And it’s a different type of fulfillment. And it’s one that lasts and endures, and it’s immensely rich. And it’ll wane, and it’ll be consolation and desolation, and you know, you could feel close to God and as far from God as you can get, but the line is always open, it’s always there, in spite of ourselves, and I just think that’s an immeasurable gift, and a gift becomes a real gift when you appreciate it, when you recognize what you have. Yes. If someone were to take your advice and pick up the Bible, where would you recommend that they open it for the first time? Would they start at the beginning? Yep. To cite my favorite musical again, the beginning is the only good place to start. I always say just start at the beginning. Just read it through. Okay. I mean, maybe because I’m a literary person, I always read things through, and I trudge through chronologically. I can certainly see… For me personally, the book that was most influential, I think, in my ultimate conversion was John. I just loved the Gospel of John. And when I was reading John was when some things really became very clear for me, when I finally sort of made the leap. I’m sure that there’s some kind of scripture verse that speaks to everyone in some sort of special way, and there are probably more efficient ways at kind of dropping it to encourage people where to read or whatnot, but I’m always an advocate of just go through the whole thing. You never what’s going to speak to you where. You never know what’s going to tick you off. I tell my students, when they’re writing essays, always write on something that bothers you. Because that’s something that’s got your attention. Yes. Something that you’re trying to work through. So I’m always amazed at friends of mine, when we read the Bible, and somebody will be completely bothered by something, and somebody will be completely fascinated by something else. I always thought the genealogy, for instance, was so boring, and it went on and on and on, and I remember Bono, one of my favorite rock stars, saying he loved the genealogy. He thought it was really fascinating, and it’s one of his favorite parts! And that’s what made me start to think about, even a theme like Sex and the City of God and our relationship to relationships and being married to Christ regardless of our status, but also, why is there genealogy in the Bible? And adoption and whatnot as well. Who knows what will speak to you, but I think if you can read the whole thing, you’ll also get a sense of the story, the moving from Genesis to Revelation, the absolute intricacy of the overall larger story and all the smaller stories within it, like ourselves, and I think everyone wants… They do want… A happy ending makes up for a lot. They do want the white stone with their name on it that only God knows. Everyone. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to be known. Fully and truly known. And acquitted and loved and loved in spite of and fully safe and known. Yeah. Yes. And the last question for you, Carolyn, is, again, a bit of advice for Christians who might be listening in who… What would you tell them in terms of… You obviously witnessed some embodied Christianity that was very attractive, whether it was intellectually or their way of hospitality or the way they engaged you. You spoke of them inviting you to the table. How can we, as Christians, make Christianity more plausible or more attractive? What would you say to them. Oh, that is a good question, too, and I feel I need advice on that. Because, by grace, we all go. I would really encourage people to not throw the baby out with the baptism water. And what I mean by that… Christians are humans, too, and we disappoint each other, and we fall short all the time, and we talk about all sorts of things, divorce rates and whatever, being just as horrible among Christians. All these ways that we tremendously hurt each other, and sometimes the pain is even worse because we think, “Oh, we should be answering to a higher bar.” There’s a lot of hurt and dissension among Christians as well. But to protect that initial first commandment between yourself and God, to really protect it. To guard our hearts. As Milton says, to have the upright heart and pure. Guarding our hearts, having that protection of our hearts, I used to think was really naive and innocent, but there’s actually… It takes a lot of work cultivating an upright heart and protecting it and protecting that inner garden, so that, even when other people hurt or disappoint us, regardless of their faith or lack of faith, our first and primary relationship with God is there. It’s nurtured. We have that line of communication open with Him. He is Emmanuel with us. He understands that hurt. He’s held it Himself. He’s borne it Himself. And He’s also borne those same joys and things, too, and to just really cultivate that first relationship, because that’s what a personal relationship is, it’s something that… It’s actually a great relief.  You’re not responsible for anyone else. And sometimes that’s actually very hard. I grew up in a very codependent home, and I want to be responsible for everybody, and you’re not. You’re not actually ultimately responsible for the other thief. You’re responsible for your own heart and how you cultivate that relationship with God and how you treat and answer to other people, and no one can take that white stone away from you. No one, as we’re told, from any depth or any place can remove His love for us. And so focusing on that first relationship, regardless of what else you’re going through or have been dealing with, but you wouldn’t get to a place where you just think, “I’m going to toss that baby out with that baptism water,” because it’s all bad. Or it’s all frustrating. Or no one’s there. Regardless to keep that primary commandment, which is why I think it is the first commandment, to love God first alive. Yeah. That’s beautiful. Sometimes that commandment is seen, especially by those who don’t believe or even those who do, it seems to be a difficult one, but at the end of the day, it’s in keeping that first command where life is actually found. So thank you so much. Thank you, Carolyn, for your story. It’s very inspiring. I love to hear someone so thoughtful, so pursuing and intentional about the big questions of life, and just to see where it led you. It led you to a place… I wish I could be underneath your teaching all of the time, but I do appreciate that you have books. Sex and the City of God, I can’t wait to read it all. Thank you again, Carolyn, for joining us today. Thank you so much, Jana. I appreciate you, too, so dearly. And I think mutual admiration is a foretaste of heaven, so praise Him. That’s wonderful. Thank you. You’re so welcome. Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Carolyn’s story. If you’re interested in finding out more about Carolyn and her work, I’ve included her website in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoy 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.

Many people reject God because of a heartbreaking event in their lives.  In today’s episode Brandon talks about not only what pushed him away from God, but also what drew him towards belief in God. You can follow Brandon on his Facebook page called Crooked Sticks at https://www.facebook.com/watch/Crooked-Sticks-110454164069538 If you’re looking for the Cold Case Christianity book investigating evidence on Christianity by cold case detective J Warner Wallace, you can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Case-Christianity-Homicide-Detective-Investigates/dp/1434704696/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1KK9XLRDQFBVD&dchild=1&keywords=cold+case+christianity+by+j.+warner+wallace&qid=1598019213&sprefix=Cold+Case+Christianity%2Caps%2C224&sr=8-2 Episode Transcript Hello, everyone, 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. Each podcast, we listen to the story of a former atheist who changed their mind and came to believe in God. We explore both sides of their life, their life and views as atheists, what made them become open to another perspective, why they decided to become Christians, and how their lives have changed. There are seemingly many reasons to reject God. One of them is disappointment with God. God doesn’t really seem to be there to answer prayers. He seems to be missing in action, and He doesn’t see or hear us when we ask for Him to intervene, to do something. In my doctoral research, I asked more than 50 atheists why they didn’t believe that God existed. On the survey, they could select all kinds of answers, including a lack of all kinds of objective evidence, but one of the most surprising findings was that the number one answer to this question was a lack of subjective evidence for God. That is, they doubted His existence because He didn’t show up in some personal way in their lives. If there was expectation, it was followed by disappointment. If God exists, He’s not good, or perhaps God just isn’t there. But no matter the reason for disbelief, it always begged the question for me what made them change their mind about God and become a Christian? What made them look to the other side, to Side B, another perspective? There must have been something that outweighed their prior doubt, disappointment, and belief. Today, we’ll be talking with Brandon McConnell. That’s his story. He was a former atheist who came to Christian faith against all odds. Welcome to the podcast, Brandon. It’s so great to have you on the show! Hey, thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here. As we’re getting started, Brandon, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? Yeah, my name is Brandon McConnell. I’m 39 years old. I actually turn 40 in October. I live right outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. I’m married. I have four kids and a golden doodle. A golden doodle. I love dogs! I love dogs. I have two goldens myself. They keep you busy, sometimes even more than the children, I must say. Yeah. I’m actually not a dog person, but my wife and kids love dogs, and we needed something hypoallergenic, and I actually him better than any dog I’ve ever had. Well, it’s hard not to like dogs, especially anything with a golden mix. Yeah. Yeah. So, Brandon, let’s start your story. You are a former atheist, so that started somewhere. So why don’t you give me a little bit of framework for where you grew up. What was the culture in which you grew up? Was it religious? Was it not religious? Was it nominally religious? Why don’t you tell me about the community and the culture in which you were raised? I grew up in a very small town in western Pennsylvania, and it was almost entirely Catholic, Roman Catholic, and I was kind of like an outsider because I wasn’t Italian, I wasn’t Catholic, and I wasn’t religious, Christian, whatever at all. And everybody just did the Catholicism thing. What do you mean by that? Did the Catholicism thing? There was a sense in a community that it was just part of the furniture there? The rituals and the rhymes of Catholic faith were around? Yeah. Like when I was in late elementary school and junior high and high school, they had these classes that they went to after school to learn more about Catholicism and the Catholic Church, like CDC, I think, was one of the acronyms I always heard, and it just seemed like everybody was part of something that I had no idea what was going on. And I grew up out in the country outside this town. Not a lot of people around. My parents were super duper poor, and I had a very isolated upbringing. It was just me and my brother, for the most part, and me and my brother weren’t interested in the same stuff. So in your family, Brandon, did they have any kind of religious reference at all? Or even if they didn’t have any kind of religious faith, did they give you any understanding of Catholicism, maybe? Because it was around you. Or even references to God or even through Christmas, any kind of culture reference? Did they speak to you in that way? We celebrated Christmas because that was a day to get presents. We celebrated Easter because that was a day to get candy. But as far as an actual faith in an actual God, I don’t remember any of that being part of the narrative until I went looking for it myself, quite frankly. So there wasn’t any overt rejection of God, it just wasn’t in your family in terms of an understanding that God’s real or whatever. It was just a cultural reference. Yeah. I would say it was a very apathetic approach to the existential things that face us. Right, right. So you were just living life and going with the flow. Yes. So no real belief in God as a child. You just never gave God much thought. No, not at all. Okay. So you’re moving along and through high school, and you’re just without thinking about God and these existential questions. What did you think… Or did you give any thought to what religion was at that point? Or was it just a cultural reference? It was a cultural thing that I wasn’t a part of, and as I got older, I started to see it as weakness. Like, “Man, why do these people need this God? Why do they need this Jesus that they talk about? Why is that such a need for these weak-minded people?” It is the way I approached it. It’s what I thought. So you didn’t mind being an outsider, I guess, because you had a negative view towards Christians and Christianity eventually. Yeah. You touched on something there. Being an outsider is… It’s always been the way I was. I didn’t have a ton of friends growing up. I lived out in the middle of nowhere. I spent most of my time out in the woods exploring and hiking and just spending time alone, and I kind of liked it that way. I’m an introvert who fakes extroversion really well. How about that? Yes. Yeah. So you’re moving along in your life, and then what happens that might disrupt your life or that makes a difference and makes you open towards the possibility of God? Well, there was a huge disruption when I was 18, and I actually had to get further from God because I could even consider that he existed. My dad died when I was 18. I was working construction at the time. I was notified that my father had a heart attack. I was living in North Carolina. He was living in Pennsylvania, and he was actually on a business trip in Virginia when he had his heart attack, and I immediately just fell to the ground, and just something told me that my dad was going to die. I just knew my dad was going to die. He was not going to survive this heart attack. And I started to pray this sobbing tear-soaked prayer to God, as I understood Him at the time, or as I considered Him at the time, and begged him to spare my dad’s life, and I did not get what I wanted. We unplugged him from the machines three days later. That must’ve been incredibly difficult. Yeah. And one of the hardest things I’ve been through, for sure. So that unanswered prayer, what did it do for you in terms of your view of God at that time? It gave me the opinion that either He flat-out didn’t exist, or if He did exist, that He was a very scornful and hateful being. And the way that manifested itself in my life was He couldn’t exist, He doesn’t exist, and I went to war with God for the next five years. Went to war? Those are pretty strong fighting words, really. What did that look like? Anywhere I saw anybody practicing any sort of faith in God, I would ridicule. I would confront. I would antagonize. I would belittle. Yeah. I was an idiot, but I was a very outspoken idiot. I can remember one time being in a bookstore and taking a stack of Bibles and putting them in the religious fiction section. Just silly, petty, little stuff like that. To express to the world my opinion, my beliefs, my hatred of God and anybody that was weak enough to believe in a God. Okay, so you were pretty extroverted in terms of your views against God, your overt rejection of Him, and anything, it sounds like anything that represented Him, I guess particularly Christianity, that you rejected the Judeo-Christian God specifically? Because I presume that’s the God you prayed to. Well, it’s tough to say who you’re praying to when you don’t have any education, no basis of faith, never read a Bible or a Koran or anything, but yeah, I would’ve said the Judeo-Christian God, because that was what I saw people putting their faith in at the time. So you were rejecting God, and it sounds like you were probably 18… You said four to five years, into your early twenties. So you were rejecting God. Did you understand what you were embracing in terms of the opposite or different? What was your reality? Where did you find truth or substantiation for your own worldview at that time? Your own way of thinking? I worshiped at the church of science. I thought science had all the answers. I believed the big bang. I believed in macro evolution. Basically everything that was taught in science class in high school and college. I was sold out to that 100%. That there was no need for God, that hypothesis. Correct. Yeah, yeah. So you’re moving along, and why don’t you tell me… Just keep going on with your story. What happened next? So when my dad died, I moved back from North Carolina to Pennsylvania. My mom was really struggling, financially, psychologically, so I moved back in with my mom. I think I would have been about 19, 20 at the time, and I started going to college. I always wanted to fly planes, so I took out a bunch of loans, and I went to a professional piloting school near where I grew up, and I was doing that, and I still remember, 9/11 happened my first semester in flight school. Oh my! It completely changed the entire game. And basically all the piloting jobs for the foreseeable future dried up overnight, and they had a dual piloting/air traffic control program, so I switched over to air traffic control, did a couple of semesters at ATC, and then, over the summer one year, this was when God showed up in my life. And my faith in science and medicine and everything was crushed. What happened? So I’m in ATC school, and I was drinking, doing drugs, hanging out, partying, just living that lifestyle, and I woke up one morning to the sound of my phone ringing, and I couldn’t see. Like I’m looking at the screen on my phone… This is back in the day of the old flip phones, so it wasn’t like an iPhone or something like that, and I couldn’t read the screen on my phone, and I’m rubbing my eyes, and I’m like, “Man, what’s going on?” Everything was just super, super blurry, and my brother came in my room, and I could tell it was a person standing there. I couldn’t recognize my brother. My eyes were really, really blurry, and I had my brother take me to the eye doctor. They did what’s called a visual field test, which basically means you push a button every time you see a light light up in different areas of a screen in front of you, and what that revealed was 80% of my visual field was blocked out, and what your brain does when that happens is it tries to fill in the gaps, and when it fills in the gaps, it just makes everything really, really blurry. So I went from the eye doctor to the hospital in the back of an ambulance because they thought I had a tumor on my ocular nerve, and I spent the next two weeks in the hospital. MRIs, CAT scans. They did a spinal tap because they thought I could have multiple sclerosis. Many, many, many different things. I was in the hospital for two weeks. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t watch television. All I could really do is sit there and think, and I felt fine. I was healthy. I didn’t feel sick. But I couldn’t see. And that started to crack the door to… Maybe science doesn’t explain everything. Maybe medicine isn’t worthy of my worship. Because it was very frustrating having something clearly going on, and nobody was able to explain it to me. I’m sure that was disconcerting in many ways, just the whole episode itself and that science didn’t live up to your expectations there, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to sit there and just be able to think for two weeks and not do much else. So, you know, when you back away from life and you’re in this disrupted place, it’s a sobering thing. So what happened? What happened to your visual issues? Did they resolve? So after two weeks, I just looked at the doctor one day. I was like, “Look, nothing’s getting done here.” It’s not cheap to stay in the hospital. I was like, “I can go home and feel fine and not be able to see. We’re not accomplishing anything,” so I checked myself out of the hospital, had my brother take me home, and about week three, it started to clear up, and I was selling TVs at Circuit City at the time. This was when I was in college. I was like, “I can go back to work.” I just needed to get out of the house. I’m not built to sit still. I am not a do-nothing type of guy. So I just finally said, “Look, Justin,” that’s my brother. I was like, “You can drive me back and forth to work. I can see well enough to sell TVs. I just can’t see well enough to drive,” and that’s what I did, and it eventually slowly cleared up to the point where I was back to normal probably a month, month and a half after it all started. So, in that period of time, when you had some time for reflection and contemplation, sitting there, as well as things were not back to normal, did you ever consider… You were disappointed with science, but were you willing to reach out then again to God or anything? Even though He had disappointed you the first time? I never really considered that option at that time. I knew science was coming up short, but I didn’t see where God fills the gaps. I get very frustrated when people say that science and God are inconsistent or incompatible. Science and God are very compatible except for when we get to the origins of how everything got started. I think belief in science and the scientific method is important. It’s not as important as my faith in Jesus, but it’s important to understand how things around us work, and science is just basically the study of how God created things. So I’m not one of those science-rejecting… Like if I got sick, I’m going to the doctor. I’m not going to pray for.. I’ll pray for healing, but I’m also going to go to the doctor. I’m not one of those people that’s going to let my kid die because, you know, “We have faith in God, so we’re not going to leverage science to solve our problem.” Right. Yeah. I’m glad you made that clear, because as you say, science and God are very compatible. So it’s not a rejection of science outright. It’s just a rejection of science as perhaps the ultimate explainer. Yeah. It’s the rejection of seeing science as the solution to every problem that we have. And I mean we’re seeing that right now with this COVID-19 stuff. We are seeing the shortcomings of men who like to play God and act like they can solve every problem we have. And when you put your faith in man to solve everything and you trust them and you take their advice, it can be described as… It’s not far short of worship for science and the scientific community. We’re seeing where that comes up short right now. Yes, I hear what you’re saying. Absolutely. So you were in this place… Back to your story again, you were in this place where your visual problems were resolving gradually, and you were returning back to work. How did that play out in terms of your life and perhaps was it playing on… Obviously some of your physical impairment affected your ability to do things like drive and that, but did it affect you emotionally at all? It had dramatic effects on me emotionally. I was told I was taking the largest dose of prednisone that they could prescribe legally, and it was an IV drip, and I don’t know if you’ve ever taken steroids? Yes. Good Lord, I was just absolutely miserable. It made me want to eat everything and kill anybody. And I gained a massive amount of weight in a very short amount of time. I was lying in a hospital bed and just irritable, very, very, very irritable. So yeah, that definitely had an effect, but I checked myself out of the hospital, I went back to work, things cleared up, and I started to go back down the course of my life. I had to drop out of school. I’d missed too much school, and to be honest with you, I had a lot more interest in being a pilot than I did in being an air traffic controller. I wasn’t very good at keeping those dots on that screen that were one day going to represent hundreds of lives. I wasn’t very good at keeping them from running into each other, which is a problem. Well, that is a problem. Yeah. So I dropped out of ATC and shortly thereafter made the decision to move to North Carolina because my whole family has migrated from western Pennsylvania to North Carolina over a couple-year period. It’s kind of strange. So I moved down here. I started working in real estate for my uncle, and shortly after I got down here, it happened again. The visual stuff happened again. And the first time didn’t really freak me out, but the second time, man, it shook my entire foundation of everything. And it didn’t last nearly as long this time, but I was like, “Man, there is really something wrong with me. Nobody can explain to me what it is, and it’s happening again.” Wow! I bet that was incredibly disconcerting. Yeah, yeah. That was when I started to consider alternative explanations for how we all got here, and I dipped my toe into a lot of different worldviews, in a swimming pool of a lot of different worldviews. I looked into Buddhism. Basically, I explored everything but Christianity first because that was what people were wanting me to look into. I have aunts and uncles and cousins and stuff like that who are Bible-believing Christians, and I don’t like to be part of the crowd. I like to do my own thing, so I looked at everything other than Jesus first. And it all came up short. It all came up short. And every system of faith that I looked into was man striving to reach God, and that just fundamentally goes against who I see myself as a person. I’m not a pleaser. I’m not somebody that wants to make… As much as you can humanize God, I’m not somebody that wants to try to make God happy at that time. Obviously, now I want to make God happy, but in my misunderstanding and my lack of knowledge of His greatness and sovereignty and beauty, I was anti-God, so I was anti anything that was me striving to please anything outside myself. Yes. So these other worldviews were coming up short, but obviously you didn’t stop there. You ended up turning somehow towards the one faith that you were trying to avoid. Tell me about that. So I had a family member come over to visit when the blindness or whatever you want to call it had set in again, and we were sitting on my couch in my apartment, and she was very… Everybody walked on eggshells around me when it came to things of faith because they knew where I stood and they knew how aggressive I had been, but she shared with me the story of Saul on the road to Damascus, and she told me that the Lord blinded him to get his attention, and I wouldn’t show it at the time, but man, did that rock my world. I didn’t give her the satisfaction of acting like that affected me, but holy cow, did that affect me! And that interaction was what got me to start actually looking into the evidence of things like the resurrection, and you know, that’s the lynchpin of Christianity, right? If the resurrection didn’t happen, none of it happened. Right. And I’m very cynical, very… I need evidence. I need proof. And it was at that point that I started to put Christianity on the same playing field and the same burden of evidence as I did for science. There are things… If you believe in macro evolution, like humans evolved from pond scum to what we are now, there are massive, massive gaps in the line of explanation of how this happened. And to think that, like, this clump of cells over here evolved into a toenail and this clump of cells over here somehow evolved into the medulla oblongata, like it just didn’t make sense. And I started to apply the same burden of evidence I had for evolution… Well, that’s my worldview. I have to allow that for Christianity. And I just started to pursue what made the most sense. What was the best explanation while allowing for the fact that I was not going to ever have an absolute 100% explanation of anything. Any worldview requires faith. And I prefer to put my faith in what makes the most sense. And I’m sure you’ve heard this example or this metaphor before, but if you look at a house, it makes more sense to look at a house and say, “Yep, somebody built that,” than it does to say, “Yeah, that just came from nowhere.” It doesn’t make sense. Right. When I started to allow for that burden of evidence and just be a little bit easier on Christianity… It doesn’t mean I turned my brain off. I did so much more thinking to come to the Christian worldview than I ever did to come to the evolution, big bang, scientific worldview. That was spoon fed to me by authority figures. And I always thought that Christianity was spoon fed to… And for some people it is. There’s a lot of Christians who don’t know why they believe what they believe. And I think that’s why you see so many people falling away from the faith and churches closing and stuff like that. Because they’re not getting asked the hard questions and offered explanations early in life. So yeah, that’s what cracked the door, and just one night, that same… It was my aunt. That same aunt invited me to go to this thing called The Power Team. It’s for little kids. If you don’t know what The Power Team is, they’re basically big beefy strong felons who put their faith in Jesus, and they do these feats of strength and share the gospel, and so after the story of Saul on the road to Damascus, I was invited to that. I went, and they did the altar call, and I was a passenger in my own ship at that point. Wow! That’s amazing! Yeah. Just to back up for just a moment, obviously you were investigating things that made the Christian world make sense, or you were open enough to see, perhaps, evidence in a new way and see things come together, and then you were invited to this event, and you talked about them giving the gospel. What did you mean by that? What is the gospel? What was it there that was so compelling that you couldn’t resist? It was at that point that… One of these guys had a manslaughter charge. He killed somebody, went to prison, served time, was saved through prison ministry, and he’s talking about how there’s nothing you can do that Jesus can’t redeem, and my entire growing-up time, around all the Catholics and all the rituals surrounding Catholicism, they always put on this shiny new penny exterior, and I looked at it, and I was like, A, I’m never going to be that good, and B, who wants to be? And I thought that’s what Christianity was, and this guy… I have no idea who he is, I’ll never see him again, and he’ll probably never hear this, but he’s talking about the things that he did that Jesus redeemed, and I was like, “Holy cow! I’ve done nothing compared to this…” And it’s not… There’s no hierarchy of sin. There’s no sin worse than another from God’s perspective, but as human beings, we tend to do that. We tend to put, “Oh, I said a cuss word,” versus, “I killed somebody.” They’re not even on the same playing field, but the word of God does not draw that hierarchy of sin, and for me, that was extremely compelling because it caused me get out of my seat and go down and receive this Jesus that he was talking about. And I still had a very, very, very limited understanding of what this thing was, but I just wanted that joy. I wanted that release of a burden of living under this sin that I was entrapped in. Yeah. And so I had to do a lot of self study, a lot of reading and learning and listening over the last, I guess decade and a half now, to get where I’m at, but man, I’m so thankful for the way that I grew up and the way that I had to go through everything because I have a much stronger faith now than most people who grew up in the church because it wasn’t my default. It wasn’t my automatic. I never take it for granted because it hasn’t always been here. Right. And like you say, there was so much… As compared to the default atheism that you fell into, you had to really be open and work towards finding a worldview that you thought was really true and real and explanatory, but once you found the gospel, that nugget of truth, and who Jesus is and that He can make sense of your life and that He can forgive you and set you free, that made all the difference. So since you’ve been living in this for the last 15 years, how have you changed? It sounds like you’ve done a lot of study. Has your life and all of those things that… Have you felt quite a difference because of the gospel, because of Jesus, because of the way that you understand the world now? How has that affected your life? Yeah. So I can still… I still remember it like yesterday. I literally said to myself, “All right, so I guess I’m a Christian now and life will be easy. Thank God. Life’s going to finally be easy.” God was laughing at that thought. Because life isn’t easier when you have faith with Jesus. If anything, my life has gotten harder. I’ve lost a house in foreclosure. My wife has had a miscarriage. I’ve got four kids now. Life is harder with kids than it is without kids. I’m married. Life is harder when you’re married than it is when you’re not married. But it’s worth it! There’s just more purpose and more meaning in my life than there ever was going to be without what I go through with God on my side. I was in real estate from the time I moved to North Carolina until 2009, which… Anybody that knows recent history knows what we went through in 2008, 2009, especially in the real estate market. I decided to go to the police academy at that point, and I went and became a cop. I was a cop for five years, and one of the things… God still gives me these little nuggets of evidence and proof and truth, and there’s a book I read called Cold Case Christianity. It’s written by a detective, and he talks about conspiracies and how conspiracies work, and if the resurrection of Christ was a conspiracy, that there’s a couple of things you have to have for a good conspiracy to work, and one of them is very few people, a very short amount of time, and massive gain for keeping the conspiracy together for all the parties involved. And there were eleven disciples plus a couple of ladies that attested that Jesus rose again, and ten of the eleven died horrible deaths because they wouldn’t say Jesus didn’t rise again, and there was no motivation. Like there was no financial gain for doing it. So I started looking at all these different things, and having investigated conspiracies myself, God, that is so true. If you’re investigating a conspiracy, if you can get people separated, give it time, and take away the motivation to keep it together, holy cow, the things unravel very, very, very quickly when you get the parties involved and you start interrogating them and stuff like that, and that’s exactly what happened to the disciples. They were together when they saw him risen again. Jesus ascended, and they scattered, and they never changed their story, man. They were facing death, very painful deaths, crucifixion and I think one or two of them were beheaded, all because they wouldn’t say that Jesus didn’t die and rise again. And that’s just so powerful for someone like me, who just demands proof, demands evidence. And I don’t see many Christian leaders talking about things like this. I’m a total apologetics nerd, and I love that war. I actually want to get more into that world and explore more, because it’s so fascinating. So you have to look at the proof that you’ve got available, and I don’t know, the older I get, the longer I look into it, and… I mean, I’m skeptical with God. I’m like, “God, did that really happen?” One of my biggest points of skepticism is the book of Jonah. Like, “God, did that dude really go in to the stomach of a fish for three days and then come out?” Even now. But God can handle your skepticism. It’s okay. It’s okay to question God. It’s okay to have that skepticism and just really question everything about what you believe. Because in the end, Christianity can meet all of that. Brandon, it sounds like you’ve really done a lot of thinking, more than just in your hospital bed for two weeks. Yeah. It sounds like what began there has really continued for years now and even just fostered a greater hunger to know what is true, and what I too appreciate about you is that you’re honest with your skepticism and doubt. I think so many people want to hide that or not admit it or not think too deeply because of their own questions, but you don’t let your questions get in the way. You actually use them as a source- Well, if you have a question about your faith and you don’t want to ask that question, it’s not because you’re afraid of offending or hurting God. It’s because you don’t want to cause trouble. Or you don’t want to make waves in the church. It’s people pleasing, is what it is. And I didn’t come here to please people. I came here to please God. And I’m going to do that to the best of my ability. Yeah. That’s good counsel, and it’s really a great example, too, of perhaps how we should all be really seeking actively, no matter really what the cost and what the challenge or what the consequence. So, Brandon, as we are wrapping up, you have given so much good advice in so many ways, but I wonder if you could speak directly to perhaps a curious skeptic who might be listening to this podcast, perhaps someone who’s been disappointed with an unanswered prayer or thought God didn’t show up in some way or anything else, what would you say to them? I would say… When I was an atheist, I used to look at the men and women who were in the church, in the faith, and sometimes I would see hypocrisy. Sometimes I would see shortcomings and failings, and I would say, “Yep, that’s God,” and I would encourage people to look beyond the people and look for God. There’s a lot of stuff that men and women do in the name of God that is a really crappy representation of who God actually is. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the most offensive message that there is to the unsaved, because fundamentally it’s the revelation that you’re not God, there’s nothing you can do to be like God in your own power, and it’s the message that you need a savior. You’ve sinned, you’ve fallen short of God, you’re not in control, and there’s nothing you can do in your own power to earn salvation. You have to accept what Christ has provided, the sacrifice He provided on the cross, in order to be saved. And that is very difficult for someone like me to accept, but it’s also very liberating because it frees you from that burden of trying to be a good little boy or a good little girl. I still screw up every day. I sin every single day. I probably sinned before I got on this podcast. That’s the nature that I was given by Adam, but God’s made a way. And I think if we would get down to the business of actually considering the evidence as it’s presented and put that evidence on the same playing field for the things that we believe by faith no matter what your worldview is, I think Christianity is… The Christian worldview is a giant among other worldviews when you really look at the evidence and you really consider everything. That’s good advice. I know that there are some skeptics who would say there is no evidence for God. How would you respond to that? To say there’s no evidence for God… Well, first of all, if you don’t believe, it’s because you don’t want to believe. We just have to get that off the table. I didn’t believe in God because I didn’t want to believe in God, but man, if just look at the world. Just look at what you can see and touch with your hands, the way everything works in perfect harmony. We have the earth tilted at a certain degree to give us seasons. We’ve got the water cycle. We’ve got nature that… It just works in perfect harmony. We’ve got man creates carbon, and trees eat carbon for food, and you know, we treat carbon like it’s a pollutant. Just all of these different systems. And then look inside of a cell. Things that we can see so much better now than when Darwin was alive and see the inner workings of a cell. It’s just amazing. It’s a universe inside of a tiny little thing under a microscope, and the way the human body works, and just… There’s so much that tells me this wasn’t just a happy accident. We didn’t just all come here because of some cosmic explosion with no guidance and no direction, and I get it. I used to believe that because I was programmed that, from an early age, through the education system, but I think if people look at the world around them without the filter, without the script that they’ve been forced to read their whole lives, God reveals Himself. God shows up. Yeah. So I don’t have any concrete proof. There’s no… I can’t show you that, but if you look for it, you’ll see it. I think that’s pretty critical. You obviously reached a point to where you were willing to see, and for a lot of us, that really is… There are things we don’t want to see, and there are things that we’re willing to see, and it really does take some intentionality of the will. Yeah. And I think it’s called faith for a reason, but I put my faith in what makes the most sense. I don’t put my faith in something I’ve been told to believe. I’ve actually searched it out for myself, and I put my faith in the thing that explains things the best. And for me, that ain’t science, and that’s not the big bang, and it’s not evolution. And one thing that gets overlooked a lot is Darwin actually started to doubt his theory towards the end of his life. Nobody talks about that. That may not be convenient to their narrative. It’s okay. Doesn’t mean it’s not true. Yes. So in terms of your advice, turning the page, to Christians. You are a very thoughtful Christian who takes your faith very seriously. Your beliefs are grounded. You also appreciate the fact that some Christians don’t live in a way that’s attractive, obviously, to onlookers. What would you like to say to the Christian right now? Why do you believe what you believe? I think a lot of Christians have never asked themselves that question. And I’m raising four kids right now, and they can tell you the gospel. But that’s not good enough for me, because I want my kids to know: Why do you believe what you believe? Is that just something you were told? Have you seen any evidence of that? I hammer my kids. Because I don’t want them to go out into this world with a foundation made out of sand, and the second they see a counter worldview, they just crumble like a house of cards, and that’s what happens in colleges in universities all over the country with young adults. Because they’ve never been challenged. They’ve never thought. They’ve never studied apologetics. They’ve never had to debate for it. It’s just been given to them. And that’s weak, and I don’t want kids with weak faith. For those Christians who actually… Perhaps apologetics is a new term for them, can you explain what apologetics is? Apologetics is being able to argue for your faith with evidence from the Bible and with evidence from outside the Bible. That’s how I understand it, anyhow. There’s probably a better definition that you could get from somebody like Frank Turek. But I don’t have a better definition. I’m a knuckle dragger apologist. I take the complex, and I distill it down to the simplest explanations that I can come up with. No, that’s a great explanation, so thank you for that. Is there anything else you would like to add to our conversation together today? Anything that’s come up in your mind? If this has sparked an interest or a curiosity in anybody, I would say just seek. Seek because not seeking has consequences. I think that’s a really, really good final word. Brandon, thank you so much for being a part of the Side B Podcast. I’ve loved hearing your story and your insights, and you’ve certainly given us a lot to think about, so thanks for coming on. Yes, ma’am. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being with me today on the Side B Podcast to hear Brandon’s story. If you want to hear more from him, you might want to visit his Facebook page, called Crooked Sticks. I’ve included a link in the episode notes. If you’re also interested in the book that he referenced, Cold Case Christianity by J. Warner Wallace, I’ve also included a link in the episode notes, so that you can locate that. 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 your social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

Raised to think critically, Jordan Monge began to question her own atheism at Harvard University when she was intellectually challenged to investigate the grounding of her worldview. Resources recommended from this episode: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Liar, Lunatic, Lord argument)   (https://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Lewis-Signature-Classic-2016-04-07/dp/B0161T0VVQ/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=C.S.+Lewis%2C+Mere+Christianity&qid=1605194057&sr=8-4)   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’s been an atheist and has 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. There’s something inside of us that we all seem to know, that is undeniable, and more than that, unavoidable. There’s that something that reminds us that our thoughts and our actions are sometimes good and sometimes not so good. If we take God off the table to find our moral freedom to determine what is good for ourselves, that comes with a cost. With atheism, there is no real good or bad, no real right or wrong. Those are merely feelings we socially construct to survive in life. The moral choice, then, becomes an oxymoron. There is no real choice. There is no real chooser. According to Richard Dawkins, we are just DNA dancing to its music. Nothing done or said is inherently bad, so there is no moral culpability. If we can’t even control our own thoughts or actions and they’re determined for us, there is no moral responsibility, but it begs the question, why are we constantly judging ourselves and others if good and bad are not real moral issues, but rather it just is the way that it is? Why do we complain about something we think is bad in the world, in others, and in ourselves, if things just are the way they are? If we accept a godless reality, we also deny the reality of our own dignity, our free choices, the things that make us human. We give up any real standards of good or evil. That was the dilemma confronting today’s podcast guest. A very intelligent, thoughtful atheist, Jordan Monge also held to a strong moral understanding of herself and the world. The problem was she didn’t have a way to make sense of her own moral judgments within her own atheistic worldview. How did she resolve this problem? I hope you’ll come along with me to see. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jordan. It’s great to have you today. Thanks for hosting me. I’m excited to be chatting with you. As we’re getting started, so the listener can have a sense of who you are, Jordan, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and maybe where you live. A little bit about your family. Yeah. So I’m originally from Irvine, California, and I graduated and went to Harvard University, where I studied philosophy, and after that, I worked for a couple of years, and then I pursued my Master’s in Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, which I completed a couple of years ago, and I finished it right before I became a mom, so I’m married now, and I have a 2-year-old daughter and I have a little 3-week-old here with me right now, so if you hear any noises in the background, you might hear him chime in just a little bit, and my husband and I, now we live in northern California, so that’s where we’re currently based, and I split my time between taking care of our two small children, and I do some tutoring on the side as well. Wonderful, wonderful. Well thank you that you’re here with us and that your new little baby is, too. Wow. Just appreciate you taking time out as a new mom. I know that’s not easy. It’s a nice mental break. Ah, yes, yes. Yes. As a mom, although I’m long past that season, I’m now an empty nester. I’m in a very different season, but I appreciate those days a long time ago and welcome those little noises if they do occur. So let’s get started with your story. you said you’re from Irvine, California. Why don’t you take us back to when you were a little girl and the context in which you grew up, perhaps your family and your community. Where did you grow up and was there any sense of God or religion or faith in your world? So my grandparents were Christian and Catholic, but my parents themselves didn’t hold any faith, so my mom just didn’t believe in God or in the Bible, but she’s not quite as adamant about it. My dad is actually a philosophy professor. He teaches at a couple of the community colleges in Orange County, California, and he has a very strong sense of what he believes and why, and his joke is that his parents sent him to 14 years of Catholic school and it was so good that he realized it was all false. That the education was so good. But he, from a young age, had questioned what they were teaching him in his Catholic school, and so, when I was growing up, my dad was actually getting his master’s in philosophy from UC Irvine, and so I would go with him to classes and I would sit in the back of the classes that he was teaching, and I continued to do that through elementary school, and so I was familiar with a lot of the arguments for and against God. And my parents felt very firmly that they didn’t want to raise me to be an atheist. They wanted to raise me to question things and to come to my own beliefs and perspective. But what’s sort of interesting about that is, from a young age, you pick up things differently being raised in an environment where your parents don’t believe, so one of the stories that my parents told me about happened when I was just four years old, actually. And we were at a party, and my mom came out to hear me arguing with one of the other little girls, and she didn’t catch the whole conversation, but the other little girl was six, and I was four, and she just heard me say, “But how do you know what the Bible says is true?” Oh, my word! At four and six years old. At four years old, yeah. So what assume she’d walked into was me kind of questioning this 6-year-old girl who was raised to be Christian, kind of noticing, “Well, if you say you believe something because the Bible says so, well why do you believe the Bible?” Right? And it would be easy to look at that and say, like, “Oh, you’re almost raised with atheist propaganda,” or raised in that way, but I think kids at that age, we always ask why, right? And so saying, “But how do you know what the Bible says is true?” is just a way of saying, “Well, why do you believe in the Bible,” and of course, the 6-year-old girl didn’t really have the best answer, and I wasn’t compelled. And what I found with a lot of Christians, even now, talking to them as adults, often they’ll have circular reasoning for why they believe in the Bible, when it comes to, like, “Well, I believe in the Bible because I think that God wrote it,” and it’s like, “Well, why do you believe in God?” “Well, it talks about him in the Bible,” and you’re like, “That is a circular argument.” Right. And so I think it’s very natural for kids, even at a young age, to start questioning, and I think, in the classical tradition, seven is considered the age of reason, and maybe having a philosophy professor as a father, you learn to reason a little bit younger. Yes, yes, I would imagine so. I can’t imagine what your dinner conversations must have been like. I’m sure he fostered that inquisitive nature in you. Obviously, it was a very natural thing if you’re talking about it at a birthday party, you know, if you’re asking questions. It was just part of who you were and I’m sure the way that you thought. Yeah! And that you were trained to think logically. And my parents always, they very firmly, they always tried to answer when I asked the question, “Why?” And I think a lot of parents feel challenged by questions, and my parents just were never that way, and they always tried to encourage me in asking questions, and I think that’s sort of the funny thing I’ve discovered as I’ve gone through adult life and gone through a couple of different types of jobs, and I realize that’s probably my greatest strength is asking the right questions. Yes. And so I think that’s something that, even though my husband and I raised our children differently with respect to what we believe, that spirit of questioning is something that I still believe in very strongly and I think should be encouraged in children, because the beautiful thing about Christianity is that, if you dig deeply enough, you start to find answers. But that first-level questioning that happens as a child—sometimes you don’t get good answers to that, so I remember the next thing I think about in my childhood, when I think about my relationship with God, my great grandfather passed away when I was six years old, and because they were Catholic, they had a Funeral Mass, and I remember going to see him at the wake, and there were prayer cards, and I cringe now. I kind of treated them like Pokemon cards, like I wanted to collect them all. Dad was like, “You can only get more cards like these if somebody passes away,” like, “You don’t want that to happen, right?” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s true.” But then afterwards, the prayer cards did talk about God, and so it’s funny. My parents, they never said, “Don’t pray,” or something like that, but I remember, after he passed away, I went home, and I started praying to God. And I kind of hid it because—again, they never said, “Don’t do this,” but I kind of sensed that they wouldn’t be behind it, you know? And so I kind of secretly started praying to myself before I went to bed. And after about three weeks of praying, I kind of thought about it, and I realized my grandfather had lived a long and decent life and passed away—actually, you know, I was six. I don’t even remember how old he was, but to me, he seemed ancient. And his body had started to deteriorate, so I realized… I thought, “If we lived forever, we would just get older and older and more decrepit, and that wouldn’t really be good, either, so there is kind of a natural time where we need to pass,” like it’s not a bad thing. And when I realized that, it sort of felt silly to ask God to stop that or to extend the life. It felt like, “Well, you should just accept that that’s the natural way that things go,” in that sense, the idea of God kind of lost His power. You don’t really need Him to overcome death, per say. At least that’s how I thought about it at six. And so that was kind of the last time, until I really was seriously considering conversion, that I had ever prayed, after the passing of my great grandfather. Yes. That’s an interesting example because it does, I think, demonstrate your intuitiveness, your wisdom, and your maturity, really, at age six, to have that kind of conception to look at the logical outworking of your prayer and what it would mean to live for a long time in this physical body. That’s quite—it shows how bright you were, I think, at that time. In certain respects, yeah. I think also it shows sort of a lack of imagination as well, that perhaps there could be some type of eternal life better than what we would ask for or imagine. Right. So, looking back, I can see, but I think that’s sort of—we all go through levels of questioning, and a lot of people think that questioning is the mature phase, and I think of questioning as the sophomoric phase. Like you’ve progressed past your freshman, and now you’re starting to question things, but after you question, you have to rebuild your own framework and decide what you believe. Because it’s always easy to be tearing down other people’s things. At some point, you have to start constructing your own belief system. And so I did start doing that as I got older, and when I was 12 or 13, I remember there was a big debate about whether the words “under God” should be taken out of the Pledge of Allegiance, and since I was an atheist, I said, “Yeah, I shouldn’t be made to say ‘under God,'” so I stopped saying “under God” when I did the Pledge of Allegiance and things like that. And it ended up being in our school newspaper in middle school. There was a debate section, and I didn’t actually write the article. I had another kid write it, and I edited it, but I ended up getting kind of into a fight of sorts with the—an argument, not a physical fist fight or something—with some of the boys in my class, and one of them actually threatened to come to my house and to shoot all of the atheists. Oh my! Okay. Yeah. So definitely an example of Christian charity. Yeah, I was going to say that’s not an example of Christian love for sure! Yeah. Yeah. So it was sort of a curiosity in that sense, because a lot of the people around me had been raised going to church or at least believing in God, and so there was some hostility there, and of course, I think I told my teacher, and they took care of it, and it wasn’t an actual… It’s funny, I wonder, 20 years later, if it would’ve been taking more seriously, him threatening something with a gun, than it was back then, but it was resolved reasonably well, but that sort of galvanized me a bit, and in high school, I would get into some arguments with friends, and actually, at one point, I brought a Bible to school with Post-it Notes in it where I had flagged the different contradictions, and I said, “What do you make of this?” And of course none of my particularly great answers because it wasn’t something that they had really studied or devoted themselves to, even if they were themselves religious or deeply religious. And so I went through high school—being an atheist was a pretty significant part of my identity, and I was always open to debate. In fact, some of them tried to debate me about creationism, and I even went and I found a book written by a creationist, and I read through the whole thing. I said, “I’ll debate you. I’ll give you a fair shot as I think about this.” And at the end of the day, I read it, and I just didn’t find it academically compelling, in terms of its arguments. And so then I ended up leaving and going to Harvard, and it was only when I went to Harvard that I finally met somebody who could start answering some of the questions that I was asking. So you really were pushing back. You were pushing back against Christianity but also, in a sense, were you justifying your own atheism in any regard? I know at a young age you were thinking logically about logical conclusions of the outworking of your worldview. Through high school, I know, because you were galvanized kind of against religion, and for good reason, really, were you looking more closely at your own atheism in terms of its own grounding? Like you said a minute ago, where it’s easy to kind of tear but it’s harder to build up or formulate your own belief system. I imagine, with your father being a philosophy professor—did you have these kind of discussions with him about what is atheism really? What does it mean to be an atheist? What are the logical implications of this worldview? For different things. Yeah. So we talked about it a little bit, and like I said, I would go with him to his classes, where he would review the different arguments for and against God, and he always had a lot of books that I would peek into and things like that. For me, I think the central sort of philosophical question that I had was less about God per se but more like what does it mean to be a good person? And what is morality? And that was the real sort of focus that I had in high school, trying to figure that out. And I was actually quite upset by it. I remember I read some of Ayn Rand’s work, and I found a lot of her material appealing in the sense that I had a strong belief that there was an objective right and wrong, but then I really felt that her philosophy didn’t hold together particularly well, and I was quite disturbed by this, and in school, we had to read things like Camus and Sartre, and I remember distinctly that one of the quotes was, “One of the greatest philosophical questions is, ‘Why not suicide?'” And I felt like Rand didn’t really give a good answer to that. And I even went to a talk that was put on by the Ayn Rand Institute, which is located in Irvine, of all places, and the guys just looked at me like I had two heads when I posed this question to them. But it was really deeply troubling me, and so I was doing a lot of reading on it, and I ended up deciding to shelve the question. I realized it was just consuming so much of my time, and I was like, “I want to get into a good college, and I want to hopefully get some scholarships, and so I’m going to bracket this question. I believe that there is such a thing as goodness, and I believe that there’s something intrinsically beautiful about what it means to be human,” and it’s funny, because I think I would have said that I believed those things, but I actually had a kind of mystical experience that convinced me of this. But there was no sense of God in that experience, just of a sort of almost divine beauty in human beings. And so I said, “I really firmly believe that, but I can’t justify it now. I’ll save it until college. Once I get into college, then I’ll devote myself more firmly to pursuing the question.” And so I think that’s part of the reason why, when somebody started arguing with me about morality and God and things like that, I was open to it, because I had said, “Okay, I’m going to bracket this so I can get into a good college and then I’ll think about it.” And the strategy ultimately worked. Because I got into Harvard. Right. And so I think in that sense I was open to it, but for me, the morality—what is good and why should we be good—those were the things that I really was wrestling with. Because I believed it to be true. I just couldn’t account for why. And so that was actually the first point that the person, Joseph Porter, that I was arguing with, who was a fellow student with me, that was the point that he started pressing me on. He said, “You believe very strongly in being good, but what does being good even mean to you? And if there’s no God, how do you have a sense of objective morality? Yeah. It’s so funny. As I go through it also, there are so many other points that I think about. Like I actually had a teacher in high school who I had been discussing some of this stuff with, and the teacher wouldn’t tell me his own beliefs, but he kind of said, “You’ve got two systems. You either believe that there’s an objective morality and that it’s given by God, or you think that morality exists because there’s some type of human consensus on it,” and he said, “If you want to talk to somebody who believes in it because of the human consensus, go talk to this other teacher,” and I was close to the other teacher as well, because I was in Amnesty International, a club that he ran, and so I was very close to him, and I said, “I don’t believe that. How could something be objective if it’s just what this group of people agrees on. What if the people change their minds?” So that was unappealing to me. But I also didn’t want to say that objective morality only existed because of God, and so I kind of was stuck. And he said, “Here’s this dilemma,” and I was like, “Oh, I’m really stuck. I can’t accept either horn of it,” and later, I ended up following up with that teacher. He had to be careful as we had conversations because, as a public school teacher, you’re not really supposed to proselytize your students, and so I think he walked a fine line. But now we’re actually good friends, and we still stay in touch. And so he was helpful to me in that way, sort of framing the problem that way, and so then I kind of had to go and figure out, “Okay, what is the objective grounding for this?” But as I studied more philosophy, I couldn’t find a way to ground an objective morality. Jordan, before we move on with this fabulous story, for those people listening who might be just curious or maybe pushing back against the idea of thinking atheists can be good without God. Or, “I can know what’s good and bad without God. I don’t need God,” can you clarify what that complaint might be against what you’re talking about, which is perhaps not knowledge but grounding for good and evil or objective morality, really? Christians also often answer this question quite badly. So I talk to a lot of Christians, and what they would say is, “Well, I try to do good things because I want to go to heaven.” Well, if you only do good things because you want to go to heaven, that’s not really good, you know? Yes. I mean, it’s not terrible, but your motivation is selfish, right? And the person who does good just because they think it’s what they ought to do ostensibly is better than the person who does it because they think that they’re going to gain some benefit out of it. And so I like, in theology, there’s the concept of perfect contrition or imperfect contrition. A person who regrets something that they’ve done only because they’re afraid of the effects. That’s an imperfect contrition. You want to have regret for the action of itself, for the failure, not because you’re afraid of the consequences, and in the same way, when you think about heaven, you want to be doing good because you value the good as goodness itself, not just because you want a good outcome. And I think that’s true… In that sense, that’s true whether your an atheist or a Christian, that it’s important that you’re pursuing the good not just because you want to gain from it. So yeah. So it’s hard to know exactly what is good, who determines what’s good, what is good. Like you were saying, is it just social consensus? Is it anything more than that? Is it just for survival of ourselves and our family? This whole concept of goodness, it’s wrapped up in a lot of different deep questions, and it sounds like, though, you’re a deep questioner. But you were being challenged on these issues at Harvard. Who was doing this challenging? Was it a Christian who was actually informed with regard to these deeper philosophical issues? Yeah. So basically it was a friend of a friend, and we had started discussing politics, and that quickly transformed into talking about morality. And so it was a Christian, Joseph Porter, who had studied more philosophy, and he was also a philosophy major. I actually originally hadn’t studied philosophy, and I switched majors after I became a Christian. But he basically just started pressing me on some of these things, like, “Okay, you say that you believe in goodness, but how do you define it? Where does it come from?” And as he questioned me, I realized, like I said, it’s easy to ask the questions, but it’s hard to build up a framework, and so I tried to mount some defenses, but ultimately, I realized that his questions were good questions, and I struggled to construct a view in which we really were… You know, you think about it what it means to be human from an atheist perspective. Well, it just happens that the universe came into existence maybe just because it’s one of many different universes, and human beings just happened to evolve, and now we’re collections of molecules and atoms that travel throughout this little dot in space that circles around the sun. In some sense, if that’s just the account of what it means to be human, then it’s quite hard to articulate why we should strive to be good. It just means that it’s a different set of atoms colliding with another set of atoms, and as an atheist, I found it very hard to sort of construct any type of goodness or argument for why we should try to be good that was well grounded, and so he really pushed me on that point. And then he also pushed me on other points about God, and so he pushed me on, “How did the universe come into existence?” And there are certain qualities about our universe, so my understanding—and I’m not a physicist, so I’m far from an expert on this. My understanding is that there are certain laws of nature which have particular properties, and if the laws of nature were tweaked even just a little bit, the universe would not be able to exist, and human beings would never come into being, and so you sort of have to give an account for, “Well, how do you think that the universe came into existence?” and, “How do you think that something could come from nothing?” And there are other responses. Some atheists believe in the multiverse, that there are many different universes and ours just happens to be the one that we came to evolve into, but then you still have to ask, “Well, where did the multiverse come from?” And basically we started arguing about the cosmological argument, this concept that there are all of these contingent things. “I exist because my parents existed, and their parents existed, and they exist because at some point, an amoeba evolved into something greater, and that happened because….” You know, you can draw this line back and back and back, but all of those things are contingent, and it seems like you need something that’s not contingent to start it all. And after sort of mulling this over for a while, I found this argument compelling. I said, “Okay, I’ll admit there’s this type of necessary, rather than contingent, being that must have been the start of the universe.” The way that I have heard it framed as well is you imagine you’ve got a building, right? And each floor rests on the previous floor, but at a certain point, for the building to stand, there has to be a foundation. It has to be a story that’s not like the other stories. And so I said, “Okay, sure. I believe in this foundation. I believe in this necessary being,” and he’s like, “Well, if you believe in that, you believe in God.” I’m like, “Hold up! There’s a lot of other things Christians talk about when they talk about God.” I’m like, “Okay, fine. If you want to call that God, you can call that God. Fine.” So I stopped being an atheist and I started being a deist, and I had the most minimal view of God that you could possibly have. Just a first cause, basically. Basically, yeah. And so, from there, then we started arguing about, “Okay, are miracles possible?” And I said, “Of course, miracles aren’t possible. There are these laws and all these things,” and it’s like, “Well, if you admit that there’s this entity.” We haven’t even agreed that the entity has intelligence or persona, right? But if you agree that there’s this entity that’s somehow responsible for the starting of this whole thing, why couldn’t the entity affect the laws, right? If the entity is the one that created the laws, why do they have to hold in all places and at all times? And I realized that one of the features of science is that we look at the world, and we extrapolate, and we measure things. Like we go and we measure gravity, right? And we say, “Gravity is part of the laws of nature.” But that’s just an observation. And, in fact, the funny thing is, if we observe exceptions, we assume that we’ve made the mistake, right? So I think about… In my physics class, we attempted to measure gravity, and of course, we didn’t quite get to 9.8. We ended up getting 9.6 or ten point something, and our physics teacher is like, “Your timers aren’t very precise, and your hands were off,” but it’s funny, because in one sense, when he sees an observation that doesn’t match with the law, he says that the observation is flawed. Now that makes sense in this particular case, for gravity, and he’s correct that our instruments aren’t good, and we probably weren’t as precise as we could be. He wasn’t wrong in that case, but it sort of shifts the way that you think about the laws if you start to recognize that the laws are extrapolations. We assume that they’re holding in all places. And there are parts of physics that it does become problematic, so one area that physics still struggles to account for, in my understanding. Again, I’m not a physicist, but there’s debate about what happens at the center of a black hole because we have two different models for what happens in physics. We have things that are modeled when they’re very small, with quantum mechanics, and we have things modeled when they’re very large, with the theory of relativity and gravity and all of these things, but we can’t quite figure out, in the center of black hole, where both should start to hold, we don’t know what that looks like, and the laws may be very different there. And so, in starting to think about that, I was like, “Well, if there was a miracle, that’s sort of the funny thing about it. In one sense, you would view it as an exception to the laws of nature, or you would assume that it was mistake. What I started to realize is, if you’re assuming that it’s mistaken, you’re taking your philosophy, your secular philosophy that there is no such thing as a miracle, and you’re applying it to the observation. Any time you observe a miracle, you’re going to disbelieve that miracle, and so, after we kind of debated the philosophy of that, I realized, “Okay, I can admit that, if there’s this entity that created the universe, then it’s possible that miracles could occur. Theoretically.” And so, from there, then you have to start arguing about any individual miracle, and I will say that I’m still a skeptic. There are a lot of people that will claim miraculous things, and there are a lot of circumstances that emerge in our lives and that I’ve seen emerge in my life since becoming a Christian, that seem ordinarily miraculous. Maybe that’s a funny term to say. But the sort of things that could happen by circumstance without God’s existence but that Christians might attribute to God, you know? “I said a prayer that my child would be healed, and they got better,” right? You could think, “Well, there’s some natural explanation. We just don’t know what it is yet, right?” You could sort of look at it that way. And I think that there are a lot of cases like that, where we should be rightfully skeptical of people that claim miracles have occurred. But then, you know, we started looking at some of the heavier-duty miracles, and particularly the miracle that we started arguing about was Jesus’s resurrection. And did that miracle actually happen. And we also had been arguing about the Bible in general. Is it reliable? And there were a couple of things that really shifted my perspective on the reliability of the Bible, so one of the things, I think one of the common misconceptions about the Bible is that there’s this game of telephone that was played, and there’s just been so many manuscripts and copyists who could introduce errors, and one of the interesting things as I studied further was that was something commonly said about the Bible, and for a long time, the oldest manuscript that we had was dated to about 950 AD, and when they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, they actually got copies of scripture that were dating back to around 200 BC, and they found that, in that 1100-year period, the number of changes was pretty minor. So I’m thinking there’s one chapter of Isaiah where there were I want to say ten differences, and a bunch of them were spelling, and basically the only real difference was the addition of one word, “light,” which didn’t change the meaning of the passage in any way. And so what I realized is that, although there are these minor discrepancies, like spelling or typos or things like that, that can be found in these manuscripts, the overall message has been remarkably consistent, and for me as a philosopher, there’s this concept in philosophy of a proposition. So you can make a statement, right? Like, “The sky is blue,” and you could make the statement in French. Oh, gosh. Now I’m blanking because my French isn’t very good. I forget if it’s le or la, but “Le ciel est bleu,” would be the French, and the two sentences, the two statements, are different, right? The word is is different in both languages, but the proposition that they represent is the same. Because they’re both conveying the same piece of information about reality. They’re just doing it in different languages. And so I realized what was sort of remarkable to me is that the central proposition of scripture had remained remarkably consistent, even if, as you go through, there are these subtle changes in the manuscripts, slight typos and things like that, and for me, that made it feel more human but no less… Well, I didn’t think it was divine to begin with, but in one sense, it actually felt like it had been well preserved, kind of well preserved more than any other document, in such a way that made me able to see God’s hand in the process, and I think it’s funny because you can look at it, and you can see, “Okay, this has been transmitted with 99% accuracy,” and you could be astonished that it’s been transmitted so well; 99%, that’s like A plus territory. And you can look at it and be so disappointed about the 1%. There was an interesting example in Biblical studies. One of the most famous scholars today is Bart Ehrman, who’s a skeptic, and he trained under Bruce Metzger, who was a believer, and Metzger looked at it, and he looked at the 99% and thought it was very impressive, and Ehrman had been raised in an evangelical community where he believed that every jot and tittle in scripture had to be consistent, and so for him, the 1% was astonishing and intolerable, and as a result, after he finished his studies, or through the process of doing his studies, he stopped believing in God, and now he’s probably the most notable secular biblical scholar in the United States, but really, for me, I took Metzger’s position. Because I had grown up thinking, “Look, there are all these contradictions. There are all these problems in it,” and seeing that it had been translated accurately was quite astonishing to me. And so it almost feels like part of what happened was how we were raised to believe in scripture shaped how we interpreted this reality about how well it had been transmitted. I also went through and was looking up the contradictions in scripture, and I came to view some of them as making it more believable. So there’s one example of how Judas died, and so in one part of scripture, it says he hung himself, and in the other part, it says he fell and his guts spilled out, more or less, and some people will say, “Well, maybe he hung himself and then fell down, and his guts spilled out, or something like that.” And there’s a way that you can do that. But for me, the fact that there are different accounts, because they come from different people, it started to make it seem more believable. In the same way that, if you had two eyewitnesses testifying in a court, and if they agreed on every detail, you’d start to become a little suspicious. You’d start to be thinking, “Well, maybe they sat down beforehand to get their story together. Because otherwise how do they have every single thing… How could they possibly remember it the exact same?” And in the same way with scripture, I think the fact that it’s written by different people and there are these minor differences between them, that to me makes it more compelling, because essentially the central proposition, these claims about who Jesus was, these are the same and consistent, and those minor details that don’t matter, they add, in my mind, to the reliability of the witness without detracting from the overall inspiration of the central proposition, which is about God’s relationship to mankind. You obviously went through a very intentional, thoughtful process as you were going through all of these issues, beginning with the moral argument, what is goodness? Where does that come from? Moving towards how did the universe get here? Why is there something rather than nothing? Looking more from a philosophical perspective and scientific, and you were looking at how scientific philosophy, methodological naturalism informs really the method that excludes the possibility of God, really, and you were realizing these things, and so I think it’s almost like you’re going down a little bit of a breadcrumb trail, and you’re opening one door, and you’re looking in there and seeing, “Now, how does that make sense?” and then very thoughtfully pursuing all of these different steps, the Bible, Jesus’s resurrection, and it’s moving you further along the way. Even though you were still somewhat a skeptic, you weren’t so closed off. You were open towards seeing where the evidence leads you, and it was leading you along this road, albeit reluctantly, it seems like, at times. Yeah. But nevertheless because you were very intellectual and a questioner and you had to be true to yourself, you couldn’t ignore what you were finding or discovering or realizing, in a sense, so almost against your own… It was like driven by your nature but almost against your own nature. Now you were moving along this road. I wondered if you knew, if you could tell where this was taking you? Yeah. You know, I definitely could, and I saw this transition happening in myself, and I think, for me, what was significant and what was helpful in going through that process was, like you said, you’re sort of picking up these breadcrumbs one by one. I think a lot of people, when they have doubts, they can feel really overwhelming. If I had sat down at the beginning, and I had said, “Well, I don’t believe all of these things about Christianity, it would be like, “Well, I’ll never become convinced,” right? But if you sort of isolate the questions one by one and analyze them separately. In some sense there are dependencies there, asking, “Is the miracle of the resurrection possible?” depends on whether miracles are possible in general, but it’s important that you break down what each question is and take them one by one, because otherwise it’s too overwhelming, and you’re going to have foggy thinking. And so instead, if you can split out what your questions are, that allows you to pursue them deeply enough, to the point where you can feel more confident in the answers that you find, and so that was sort of what happened to me slowly over time. As I started going through this process, once I became a deist, which was probably about halfway through, I started going to church as well, mostly just to find out more. And it was something I hadn’t really… You know, I had occasionally gone to Catholic Mass with my grandmother and things like that, but it was the first time I’d ever really gone on my own, with an eye toward understanding and learning. Not that I agreed with everything, but just to kind of see what this whole thing’s about. And so I started going through that process. And I also started doing a Bible study with some women. And at the same time that I was having the sort of philosophical questions with my friend, Joseph, I was having some personal questioning with these women as well. For me, like I said, I had always viewed myself primarily as a good person, and you can hear my newborn is starting to wake up. If there’s anything that makes you think you’re a good person, once you have children, you realize how wrong you were. Any parent will appreciate that. And connect with that for sure. Yeah. But basically, as I started talking with these women, I started realizing that Christianity had a higher standard than I had been made to believe. And I read through the Sermon on the Mount, and I realized Jesus has a very high standard. He says not just that you can’t murder people but you can’t even be angry, and it’s not enough to not commit adultery, but you can’t even lust after people, because that’s adultery in your heart. And when I started realizing that, I realized that, deep down, there was a lot of anger in me, and there was a lot of… I think every family has their sins, but I think in particular I’ve noticed that, in my family, we can hold a grudge, you know? And realizing that I wasn’t a very forgiving person, I started realizing, if this is the standard that God has for goodness, then by any stretch, I’m not good. And shifting from thinking that, roughly, we’re all good people, like most people will probably will get to heaven if it’s for good people, because we’re not, like, going out and… Again, we’re not murdering people. Most people aren’t getting into fights and things like that. Shifting from that perspective to the perspective of, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” was pretty dramatic. And realizing I’m not as good as I like to think myself. Developing a sense of that humility was significant for me. So, as someone who has really walked both sides, and you took a very judicious journey, journeying from atheism to Christianity and even a judicious journey even into your and through your Christianity, which I so appreciate, what would you say to perhaps someone who might be listening who’s curious, who’s an atheist, maybe an agnostic, or for someone who really hasn’t considered God or Christianity very thoughtfully but perhaps might be open to it, what would you say to someone like that? Yeah. I think that, first of all, it’s great that you have that openness, and I would say continue to be open to God, whoever you meet, wherever you end up. I think the first step, like I said… Read through the New Testament yourself. Encounter Jesus in the gospels. And then try to live out these teachings that you see there. I think a great place to start is always the Sermon on the Mount. And then the other thing I would say, from my own experience, was you have to live out the truth, and you have to take the steps of commitment that that entails. So getting baptized. If you’ve already been baptized, getting confirmed. If you’ve already done those things, you know, getting back involved in a church community. And I would also say be conscientious as you enter a church community. I think one of the things I struggled the most with as a new believer was finding a good church community, and I went through several churches that had their varying problems, and a quote that always sticks with me is, “If a church were perfect, then I’d have no place in it.” Because I’m not perfect, right? Right. None of us are. Yeah. But try to find a community that’s strong and healthy, that seems to be living out these teachings as best you understand them. And don’t let others spiritually steamroll you. Ask questions and try to find a place that seems like they’re doing their best to follow the teachings. You know, there are a lot of churches today that reject certain parts of scripture, whether that’s rejecting the parts about sexual morality or whether that’s rejecting the parts that are talking about caring for the poor or whether that’s just the parts that talk about idolatry and God’s kingdom coming first. In America, we have a common heresy of thinking that America is the end-all, be-all, and there are a lot of churches where voting for Trump is more important than living out your faith in other ways, and so, knowing that a vote does not a Christian make. There are many other things that are involved. So finding a place that seems to be very holistic in their approach to Christianity, I think, is important. That’s good advice. And to those who are Christians who might be listening to this podcast and want to be able to engage meaningfully with those who don’t believe but may be apprehensive or perhaps may need some encouragement or even counsel as to the way that they embody Christianity, what would you say to Christians who might be listening? Yeah. I think a couple of things. One is that fear can sometimes be a good thing. Sometimes you’re afraid because you actually don’t know enough, and so if you’re afraid because you don’t know what you would say or you feel like you just don’t understand things well enough, then go study the faith. St. Peter advises that you need to have an answer to the questions that people are asking you. Well, if you haven’t studied it yourself, how would you have an answer? So go and study these things. And see, is that the source of your fear? Or is the fear coming from some other place of timidity? Of a spirit that’s afraid to stand for what you believe in, in which case it’s really a lack of courage. And if it’s a lack of courage, take heart and practice and start small. I think a lot of people are afraid… There are certain people that get into the habit of debating to win, rather than debating to find truth, and if you are that type of person, it can be helpful to, rather than think of it as a debate, just try to ask good questions, and that’s what I saw Joseph do with me. He asked, “Well, what does good mean to you?” and, “How can objective morality exist if you don’t have a God to ground it in?” In one sense, you could think about asking that in an argumentative way. “How could you believe in the good without God?” right? But there’s a friendly way to ask it, and so what I’ve found is, in general, if you talk to people about their religious beliefs and you ask questions in an open-ended and non-accusatory way, very few people react badly, and so think about and practice ways to ask those questions less confrontationally. Because I think when you do that then you have nothing to fear. You’re just asking people about their deeply held beliefs, and most people are glad to explore those. And finally I would say please, please do not argue with people about creationism. That’s the one thing that I look back and I just think, you know, I had multiple Christian friends in high school who wanted to talk about creationism, and that did not resonate with me. I still don’t believe in young earth or old earth creationism. I believe in a God that guided evolution, and most of the denominations in the United States leave that explicitly in their mission statements, that you can believe in evolution. And so I just look back, and I think, “What a shame. These Christians were very fervent and faithful believers, but they spent their time arguing with me about something that was never going to… It never ended, right? I still believe what I believed from the beginning, with the exception that I believe God guided the process now, rather than believing it was purely naturalistic. But in all that time, they never stopped to talk to me about who Jesus was, what He taught, why He taught it. It’s mind boggling to me that I grew up in the United States, in Orange County, which is moderate in general. There are a lot of liberals there. There are a lot of conservatives there. And I had never heard the gospel until was 18 and in college because every time I had ended up talking to people—and what I found in Orange County when I’ve gone back is that you will meet Christians there who will be sleeping with their boyfriend, getting drunk every weekend, and they’ll think that they’re a good Christian because they believe in creationism, and that’s really missing the picture, and you’ve got bigger fish to fry than that. So I don’t judge people that are creationists. I have a lot of respect for various ones. And if that’s what you believe, by all means you’re free to go ahead and believe it, and I still welcome you as a brother or sister in Christ, but I just ask that you not make that the central thing that you argue with atheists about because it’s very rare that it will work and if it does and somebody later comes to change their mind and not believe creationism anymore, then you’ve undermined the central part of their faith, and I think that’s also really not fair. The faith needs to be grounded on the rock that is Jesus. And not on some other philosophy or some other belief system. I’m so glad that you brought this, Jordan, to the center, which is Jesus and His question, “Who do you say that I am?” because, as you say, we oftentimes get distracted, whether we’re atheists or Christians or whatever, about secondary or really nonessential issues and end up going down rabbit trails instead of really looking at keeping the main thing the main thing. Mere Christianity, who is Jesus? Was He resurrected? Was He the Son of God He claimed to be? Those big, big questions regarding truth. Because He claimed to be truth, not just that He knows truth or that He tells truth, that He is the truth, so thank you for bringing that back around front and central. Yeah. And also, Jordan, I really appreciate your story. I love it because it’s just so incredibly thoughtful. And for those who think that Christians aren’t thinking people or intellectual people, I mean, you’re Ivy League educated. You really moved through this process from one strong ideology to another in a very careful, diligent way, and no one can fault you for that, and I just appreciate the way in which you did it. The intellectual integrity in which you did it, as well as, like you say, adopting another worldview is more than just an intellectual journeying. You really looked at it in terms of where these ideas lead. They mean something. They are embodied sensibility of the truth. So thank you for the really full and holistic way in which you told us about your journey and the way that you live as a Christian now. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me, and thank you for giving me extra time. I will say, you can ask my family, I have never been accused of under thinking things. Yes. That’s really wonderful. Thank you again, Jordan. Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Jordan’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.

Former atheist Mike Arnold suffered an unspeakable childhood tragedy which suddenly catapulted him into atheism.  After twenty years, he was given cause to reconsider not only God’s existence, but God’s goodness as well. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for being with me today. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. What happens to your view of God when bad, especially traumatic things happen in your life? You may have had expectations of a good, loving, and powerful God who’s supposed to protect you at every turn. The bad things aren’t supposed to happen. But they do. You begin to wonder, “Where was God? Who is this God that I thought existed? Maybe He doesn’t exist after all. How could He, in light of such horrible circumstances?” Belief in a good God often crumbles under the weight of pain. If that’s true of an adult, it’s especially true of a child. When a child suffers sudden, unspeakable loss, it’s not surprising when they also suddenly lose whatever faith they must have had in a God who seemed to go missing. Pushing God away is the only viable option left on the table. The only problem is life without God doesn’t seem to have any existentially satisfying answers, either. That’s the tension faced by the former atheist in our story today. Someone who hated God for nearly 20 years, a God, in his view, who didn’t exist, but comes to experience God in an unexpected way. Mike Arnold was a former atheist but is now a Christian and serves his community as a Christian pastor. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mike. It’s so great to have you! It’s great to be on as well and to join you on this cast. Thank you, thank you. As we’re getting started, why don’t we start by you telling me a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, and perhaps where you live now, what you do now? Yeah, well, my name is Michael Arnold. Everybody calls me Mike, and I prefer it that way. I’m a bit laid back, but if you’re thinking, “This man sounds really strange,” it’s because I’m from Wales. I’m a Welshman, but I’m actually living in a small town in the East Midlands of England called Long Eaton, where I’m a Baptist minister. And you’ve been in England for how long? I moved here 12 years ago, into a different pastorate. I recently left there and moved here, but yeah, 12 years ago, I moved from Wales into England, where I can honestly say that I’m a missionary. Yes, yes. That’s great. All right. So at least we know where you are now. And let’s now kind of start back at the beginning of your story. I presume, if you’re from Wales, you had a childhood in Wales? And your ideas of God and faith and religion developed there. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about that your childhood, your understanding of if there was a God, those kinds of things. Well, I grew up… My parents, like so many parents, didn’t actually attend church and had no faith at all. They wanted, I think, a quiet afternoon on a Sunday, and so they used to send me and my brothers and sister to Sunday school at the local Pentecostal church, and that’s where I went for about 18 months, up until the age of seven. The one morning I stopped going because the one morning I was woke up by my brother, Tony. He was 11 years old. I was 7 at the time. But he woke me up to say that the house was on fire, and yeah, sure enough, it was. We went to get Mom because she was sleeping in her bedroom. We went to wake her up, and then she raised the alarm by smashing out the bedroom windows, and I jumped out of the bedroom window, and my brother Tony, at the time, realized that my youngest brother, David, who was 3 years old, was still somewhere upstairs in bed, so he went looking for him. I jumped out of the bedroom window, and I have 47 stitches across my backside because I fell onto a piece of glass on the pavement, and I was taken into my neighbor’s house. When they were ready for me to go to the ambulance, as I was going to the ambulance, my brother Tony walked out of the front door of the house, and he was a ball of fire. He suffered third-degree burns over 90% of his body. Oh, my. Oh. Well, it is what it is, isn’t it? You know. He survived for five days in absolute agony. I was put in the ambulance at his feet, and for the next ten minutes, while they raced us off to the hospital, that’s all I could hear was him screaming in agony. And that was the last I saw of him. They found my younger brother, David, who was 3 years old, as I said. They found him curled up dead in my mother’s bedroom, near my mother’s bed. He never got out of the house alive. The following Sunday, Mom sent me to church, where the minister said, “Come and give praise to God,” and I thought, “Praise to God!” I ran off. I didn’t want anything to do with Him. I thought to myself, “If God loves us,” as I had learned in Sunday school, “why would He do this to my brother Tony?” And so I became an atheist. I wanted nothing to do with God at all. And I became evangelical. I stopped going to church. I became an evangelical atheist, and whenever I would come across Christians, I would get into conversations with them. I would ridicule them. I would mock them. I would get into arguments with them. I would tell them how stupid they were, how foolish they were. Yeah. That was my life growing up where faith was concerned. And that’s how it was. I had nothing to do with church, wanted nothing to do with church, wanted nothing to do with God. Would argue with anybody who was religious. So there was a lot of pain and anger. It manifested in anger towards God, towards anything religious, towards religious people? Yeah. There was anger. I felt a lot of guilt as well because I survived while my two brothers were taken. And so I felt a lot of guilt. My life was driven by anger. I would become periodically depressed and everything else. I was actually diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder when I was 24. I had a serious breakdown when I was 24, and I was taken to the doctor, and they diagnosed me with PTSD, and I was able to have some psychiatric counseling, and that allowed me to regain control at that time. And that’s the way it was. And it was working its way out. Wow. It sounds like the trauma you incurred as a child is unspeakable. Truly. I can’t imagine. But it affected every part of your life, it sounds like. For a long time. Wow. So you got a little bit of counseling to help perhaps deal with some of the pain and the anger and the guilt that you were feeling. What happened then? What was the next step in your journey? I would imagine it would be a little difficult to have relationships when you’re trying to deal with all of this going on internally within yourself. It was. And I was in a long-term relationship with a girl. We were living together. And I put her through absolute hell. When I had a breakdown, honestly, I put her through hell. It was her that talked me into the doctor. She couldn’t cope with me anymore. And it was through that that I got counseling, and it just enabled me to get control again, you know? Right. But as I had the breakdown I lost my job, and for several months, I was out of work because I just couldn’t cope with anything. I would sit in the corner for days on end. And then what happened was I managed to get myself back up on my feet, and I found a new job with a Japanese company, and they sent me to Japan for three months for training. When I got back, my partner had become a Christian. And that is never a good mix with me because I was the outspoken atheist, and now I’m living with the enemy. Right. Every time she went to church, she came back to an argument. Every time she went to a prayer meeting, she came back to an argument. And again, when I argued, I wouldn’t hold back, and I really feel sorry for her because she had to put up with me having a go at her every time she went to church. She was more agnostic. She told me that, when I was in Japan, she was in the gym one day, and a hymn kept going over and over and over in her mind. And she knew a Christian in the gym, and she said, “I’m having this strange experience. This hymn keeps going over and over in my mind.” And the Christian said, “Oh, the Lord is speaking to you!” And I thought, “Yeah, okay.” Right. While I was there, she started going to church. Which was an interesting experience for her, but it was a great taboo, so the first thing is she was afraid to tell me that she’d started going to church, but what I did realize was the person I came back to when I returned from Japan wasn’t the person I left when I went there. There was something completely different about her. And I could see it in her, that there was a huge change in her. And for the next twelve months or so, she showed the patience of a saint with me, I tell you. I’ve got to be fair. So there was a huge change in her. So she was patient. What else was different about her that you noticed that made you feel as if she was a completely different person? Well, it was her outlook. She was far more patient with me. She was far more laid back. She seemed to be much happier, much calmer. And she kept praying as well, which freaked me out. So she was happier and calm and more patient with you, but yet you were probably more resentful of this. As this militant atheist, this angry atheist at religion and God and all of those things, I can’t imagine, despite her patience, that your relationship would have been calm in any way. It nearly broke our relationship at the time. It really did. Because she was now… In my eyes, she was the enemy. And, like I said, every time she went out to church, it would result in an argument, and yet, patiently, she had people praying for me in the background. And then one night… I was working on a split shift, which is mornings, afternoons, and nights. And the one evening I came in from work, it was about midnight. I had been working a late shift, and the house was empty, and that caused me to worry a bit because she’s a woman on her own, and she wasn’t there, and I didn’t know where she was. And then the phone rang, and she said she was over with some Christian friends. Would I mind going over and picking her up? And by the time I got there, I was ready for a fight. I’ll say it that. I was absolutely seething because she was out at that time of night and she was with Christian friends. And she should’ve been at home. And I was waiting for them to mention Jesus, and I would have just erupted. And they didn’t. And I was there for three hours with them, and they didn’t mention Jesus once. They offered me a coffee. They talked to me sensibly. They didn’t broach Christianity or Jesus or God or faith in any way, shape, and form, and that got me puzzled, I will say. That was probably very disarming, probably not what you expected when you walked in the door. Oh, yeah. I was waiting for it. I was railing to go, you know? And they didn’t talk about Jesus at all, and part of me was disappointed, part of me was intrigued. So what was intriguing about this? The fact that these were the first Christians I’d met in a very long time that didn’t talk about Jesus or try and wangle Jesus into a conversation, you know? My experience of Christians is they’re there and they want to preach at you and they want to tell you how bad you are, that you’re a sinner, that you need to repent, to put your faith in Him, and there was none of it! And that is quite surprising when your experience of Christians is this is what they do, and then you can fight them and battle them and tell them how stupid they are. Yeah. And that just didn’t happen here. No, it didn’t. And it didn’t happen for weeks. Every time I met with them. And I got to a point where I was visiting them every single day. And if I was on afternoon shift, I’d go over in the morning. If I was on night shift, I’d go there in the evening. If I was off work, I would be there most of the day. And they wouldn’t talk about Jesus. And in the end, it was me who brought Jesus up, and I started questioning them, and I didn’t have any—I didn’t want to know Jesus. I wanted to get them talking, so it could provoke an argument, so I could tell them how foolish they were in believing in this nonexistent thing. And it went like that for several months, I’ve got to be fair, and we would have some very good conversations that would very quickly degenerate into an argument. Sometimes we would have good conversations and I would leave it there, and then I would lull them into a false sense of security, and I would go back the next day, and they would think, “Yes, we’re getting somewhere with him,” and I would start arguing with them again. This went on for several months. Oh! And you were arguing about just the big issues of God or science or—what kinds of things, what kind of conversations were you having? Science, that science has proved that there is no God. I was into the writings of Erich von Daniken that Jesus was an alien and all this sort of stuff and what they thought was God was an advanced alien species that visited earth at some point, that evolution has disproved that God created us, and anything that would disprove this nonsense that they were believing, you know? And so I’d come at it from a scientific point of view, from the alien point of view, from the evolution point of view, and from the point of view that if God was so powerful why did He do this and allow this and why were there earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and natural disasters? You name it, that’s the path that I walked. Well, were they able to respond with any substance to your accusations at all? Or were they were able to meaningfully participate in an intelligent way? Sometimes. Yeah? Sometimes. And sometimes, depending on what mood I was in, they were a bit more successful than other times, but I found that, if someone doesn’t want to listen, no matter what you say, if they’re not prepared to listen, you may as well just say, “Well, I understand where you’re coming from,” and leave it at that. Because if someone doesn’t want to engage and doesn’t want to listen, then that’s it, you know? But there were times when actually I realized after a while that I did want to listen. I did want to hear. That’s a really huge statement that you just made, that the desire to listen or not—we’ll return to our conversation with Mike in just a moment. What do you think allowed you to turn from the resistance and the not willing to listen to move to a posture of, “Maybe I do want to hear what they’re saying,” in a more open way. What made that switch in you? What do you suppose happened there? It wasn’t that they were making sense or whatever. It was who they were. And the fact that they weren’t pointing the finger at me, they weren’t judging me, they were accepting me for who I was without judgment, and they were allowing me to be me. And I think, very often, Christians come at atheists with a view of, “You’re a sinner. You need to be a Christian. You need to put your faith in Jesus,” and I had none of that. It was just, “We’re going to love you for who you are, and we’re going to give you the space to be who you are.” And that got me to a point where I was actually willing to give them the time and listen to what they had to say, even to the point where, even if I didn’t agree with it, I would at least give them the respect they needed, or that they deserved, because they gave me the respect that I deserved. And it got to a point where, after several months we went to visit them one Friday evening, in October, 1996, and my partner and his wife went to put the kettle on, and the kettle took 5-1/2 hours to boil because, as we sat there waiting for the kettle, he said, “Mike, I’ve got to ask you. I seem to take a couple of steps forward with you only to realize that I’ve taken actually three steps backward. And it baffles me.” He said, “What do you hold against God?” And for five hours that night in October, 1996, I just told him my story. And for five hours, I just poured it out, and what struck me as I was sharing my story with him was that I could hear him sobbing. The room was semi-dark, and the light was behind him, and his face was in darkness, and I could hear him sobbing, and that really hit me. And he cared. You know? Yes. And at the end of five hours, he said to me, he said, “Would you mind if I prayed for you?” And I looked at him, and I said, “Well, if you think it’ll do any good, you go for it,” so he came over, and he put his hands on my head, and he said, “I’m going to start praying for you, and I’ll pray in English, but if I stop praying in English and I start praying in something else, don’t worry about it. I’ll only be speaking to God.” And he started praying with me, and he started praying in English, and then he stopped praying in English, and he started praying in something else, and it was at that point I wanted to get up and run like hell. It freaked me out. Yes! It did. It really freaked me out. I went cold. I wanted to be sick. I wanted to run. And he prayed with me, and he sat down, and he called the women in, and they came in. They put a cup of coffee in front of me, and we just had a time of fellowship. And when we left, it was about 2:00 in the morning, my partner said to me, she said, “How are you feeling?” And I said, “I think I’m demon possessed because he started praying for me, and I felt like this,” and she said to me, “No, no. That’s normal when people pray with you.” And I know, of course, it’s not normal. She was lying. Oh. But that was it. That was my experience that night. Over the next couple of weeks, I found I couldn’t argue with him anymore. I could argue with other Christians, but I couldn’t argue with him. And after a couple of weeks, he said to me, “Mike, how are you feeling?” and I said, “You know, it’s really strange. I can’t argue with you. I’m finding that I can’t argue with you anymore.” I said, “But also I feel really peaceful.” I said, “I can’t explain it.” And he laughed, he started laughing, and I said, “Don’t laugh. I’m being serious.” “No, no,” he said, “isn’t that what I prayed for when I prayed with you? I said, ‘Lord, this boy has never known peace in his life. Would you please give him peace?'” and as he said those words, it was like a thunderclap going off inside me, I’ll tell you what, and I thought, “Oh, heck, if the prayer can be answered,” and it was. That was what he’d prayed. “This boy has never known peace in his life. Would you please give him peace?” And I thought to myself that night, “If a prayer can be answered, there must be someone there who is able to answer prayers.” And I was wrong. I went in, I told my partner that I’d asked the Lord into my life. She gave one almighty scream and got on the phone, and she started phoning everybody, saying that I’d accepted the Lord into my life. I bet they couldn’t believe it! They couldn’t! I went to church the following Sunday. This was on another Friday. I went to church on Sunday. It was that exciting I went to sleep halfway through the service. This was the first time you’d been to church since you were a child, like six years old. Since I was seven, yeah. I was twenty six at the time, and that was the first time I’d been in church in 20 years. Wow. I wouldn’t even go into a church for a funeral. I would stand outside on the door. And that’s where I was. I wouldn’t even go into a church for a funeral, and here I was, found myself in church for the first time in nigh on twenty years, and I fell asleep. Not an exciting sermon, I guess. No. But it was such a peaceful place. Ahhhh. The peace. It was such a peaceful place, and yeah. And I was like that for weeks. For weeks I went to church every Sunday, and I would fall asleep. And people were patient with me. They’d give me a nudge if I started snoring too much, you know? But they just let me be who I was. And it was nice to be there, you know? Yes. And then I started questioning my friend Keith because I wanted to know. And there it was. I’d like to say that everything worked out perfectly. My partner left within 18 months. She backslid. As far as I’m aware, she has no faith now. And she has no faith, and I ended up going on by myself to church. When she left, I had another breakdown, but this time, I was put in touch with a group of Christian counselors, and they worked with me for a year, and they worked with me through the issues of the post-traumatic stress. They kept asking me, “Why do you feel guilty?” and I kept answering with all of the answers I could think of, and they kept saying, “No, that’s not the answer,” and in desperation, I cried out to God, and I said, “Lord, why do I keep feeling guilty?” and He showed me, and in showing me, He set me free from it. And then he set me free from the anger, and once the anger and the guilt had gone, so did the depression go with it, and so, for the last probably 20 years now, I’ve had no depression, I’ve had no anger, I’ve had no guilt. He has completely set me free from the lot. Wow. Wow. So your life changed in a dramatic way, just like when you came home to your partner, and she had become a completely different person, it was like you became a completely different person once you found God and Christ. Yeah. The Bible says in it that those the Lord sets free are free indeed. Well, the Lord set me free from depression, from extreme anger issues, from serious guilt, to the point where I would become suicidal, and I have tried to commit suicide on three occasions in the past. Whenever the PTSD would kick in because it’s almost cyclical, and He set me free from the lot. But it was at that time when He set me free that He then started calling me. He said, “I want you to come into ministry,” and I was working as an engineer in a factory at that time, and He started calling me into ministry. And so I refused. I said, “I’m a failure. I can’t be a minister. Because we all know that ministers live perfect lives and they’re perfect people, and I’m a failure. I’ve suffered with PTSD and guilt and anger, and I’ve done things that I’m not really proud of,” and yeah. And there is the Lord then saying, “I want you to go to college and become a minister,” and for several years I said no. And then I met a young woman who was in the local Baptist church, and I kept talking to her about how God was calling me into ministry, and I said, “This is where I feel God is calling me,” and she said, “Well, would you please be quiet about it or go and sort it out and do something about it?” Because I was driving her nuts because I was talking about it all the time, but I wasn’t doing anything, and in the end, I went to a local college that is run by the Baptists in Cardiff, and I had an interview there. I was in the Pentecostals at the time, and he said, “Because you’re a Pentecostal, you would have to pay for yourself,” for the tuition fees and everything else. It was going to cost 12,000 pound, and because I had gone through this breakup and I was up to my ears in debt, I thought, “This is never going to happen,” and so I prayed about it, and I’d gone to this interview on Wednesday, and I went into work on the following Friday, two days later, and they asked for people to take voluntary redundancy. And I nearly fell off the chair laughing. What does that mean? Voluntary redundancy? This is where they wanted to get rid of workers, and because of various issues, they wanted to make people redundant, so what they do in this country, they don’t just give people their cards. What they do initially is say, “We need to make so many people redundant. Could we ask for volunteers?” People who were happy to take a redundancy package instead of just making people redundant. And so I fell off the chair laughing. And my boss said to me, “Why are you reacting like this?” I said, “Don’t worry about it,” so I went and put in my application, and within minutes, they said, “Well, because you were volunteering, we will give you this redundancy package, and it’ll be a lump sum payment of 12,000 pounds.” Oh my. And it was a redundancy package that paid for me to go to college. I signed the paperwork then and there. It took me five minutes. And from there, I left work. I got married and went straight into theology college in Cardiff. And to see the Lord moving in that was absolutely brilliant. So that was 15 years ago I went into college. I was there for three years. I became a minister. The Lord called me to move from Wales into England, where I took up a pastorate in a small mining village, and yeah. Yeah. That’s where I’ve been ministering since, until about a month ago, where I’ve moved over now into Long Eaton. So you moved from a place of atheism, rage, depression, anger, guilt, PTSD, to a place of being released from all of that as a Christian and believing in God, and now you, in your life, go and minister to those who have questions, that have pain, that have anger. It’s almost like you’ve seen your story come full circle. The irony is not lost on me. I think God has a sense of humor. Yeah. And there are a number of people I talk to, and it starts off with, “I can’t talk to you. You’re a minister. You couldn’t possibly know what it’s like.” Right. Because people think ministers have it all together. And I say to them, and I always respond in the same way, I say, “Well, would you please give me a couple of moments just to share something of my own story with you? And if you feel the same way after, I’ll finish my cup of coffee, I’ll bless you, and I’ll go.” And I share a couple of minutes of my story and what I’ve experienced, and then they say, “Oh, you do know what it’s like. I’ll talk with you,” and it is out of everything of my own experience that I am able to reach out to people and minister to them and help them through it because I’ve walked the road with them. Right. And it’s got to a point where I work with local schools now and I lecture on faith and science. I teach ethics. I do apologetics and all this sort of stuff as I talk with different atheists and yeah. So that’s where I am now. And I help as many people as I can. What an amazing story. Truly an amazing story. As I’m sitting here thinking on your story, and with your wisdom and your experience, I’m wondering if there are those who are listening who are asking the same kind of question perhaps that you did. “Where was God? How could these bad things happen? Why is my life like this?” I wondered if you wouldn’t mind just giving us a little word. How would you encourage someone to think if they’re really questioning God because their circumstances? It’s an interesting one, isn’t it? If I may share a short story with you, I was recently talking to a survivor of Auschwitz, you know the concentration camp. Sure. And I was sat in a classroom full of children listening to this survivor as he shared his story, and I thought, “I’m going to play devil’s advocate here,” and so the children were asking different questions. I put my hand up and I said, “Tell me, are you still a practicing Jew,” and he said, “Yes, I am.” And I said, “Tell me, where was God when you were in this camp?” And he said, “Do you know, I never saw God gas anybody. I never saw God shoot anybody. I never saw God beat anybody. I never saw God do any of it.” And I pondered this, and as I reflect on my own story, I never seen God set fire to my house. It was an electrical fault because we had bad wiring. And yet, as a child, I blamed God. We always want somebody to blame for circumstances in our lives or because somebody else has done something they shouldn’t have done that, if they had been following God’s way, they wouldn’t have done in the first place. But because they’re not following what God wants them to do, they treat people badly, and very often, we are experiencing the result of what they shouldn’t be doing, but we can’t blame them. We blame God. “Why did God allow this?” No. “Why did they do it in the first place?” “Why did God allow this illness?” Because we live on a planet where we know illnesses exist. It’s the way it is. But we feel in ourselves that we’ve got to blame someone, so where there’s nobody to blame, we point our finger and we shake our fist at the heavens, and we scream and shout at God and say, “How dare you do this?” And yet the truth is what He is saying is, “Well, if I was walking with you, I would be comforting you in this. I would be giving you the strength to face it. I would be with you, walking with you through it, encouraging you, and strengthening you.” Because the Bible tells me Jesus said himself, “I will never leave you or forsake you, and when these things happen, I will help you.” Thinking about what you’re saying and also thinking about your story, as well as the peace that you were able to find that I presume has never left. No, it hasn’t. Yeah. It’s the peace that you have regardless of your circumstances now, and it’s a peace that you can demonstrate. Yeah. And, again, I ended up, five or six years ago, just before I met you in fact, I think I shared with you when we first met that I was going through a divorce because my wife decided that she was leaving. Completely out of the blue. And through all of that, the sense of peace I had, and you know, it was very upsetting. There were times when I bawled my eyes out, and I cried profusely and everything else, but still the sense of peace that I had. And I knew I wasn’t on my own. And I came through at the other end, and I was able to put down things that I had been carrying for many years, and through that experience, the Lord set me free from other things, and yeah. To see the Lord moving through even the difficult times has been absolutely astonishing. What a life! And what a story! Mike, truly, I loved hearing your story, as well as your counsel and your experience, and there’s just so much there for us to listen to, really. As we’re kind of winding up, what I’d like for you to do is, if there are those who are listening who are really still quite skeptical about God and that whole question but yet there’s something in your story that’s intriguing to them. Perhaps they can see themselves in where you were. But like you were able to kind of turn your corner of not willing to listen to willing to listen, I wondered if someone was willing to listen, what would you say to that skeptic? To be open, I think. We may not understand it. We may not agree with it. But be open to a possibility because you never know. Science—if you’re thinking, “I’m an atheist. I believe in science. Science has all the answers.” No, it don’t. There are things that science can’t answer, and who knows? We’re discovering new things all the time. Sometimes we discover what we think are new things that are actually very old, and we had known them but forgotten, and sometimes—I would just say be open. If you want to go and talk to a minister, respect where they are coming from if they are respecting where you are coming from. And I was very fortunate that I found a couple of Christians who were respectful of me, and that gave me the opportunity to just relax and be myself, and as argumentative as I was, I got to respect them for who they were. And that changed things for me. So be open to people. That’s what I would want to say to someone. And if you had the opportunity to talk to Christians who were wanting to be open and have a mutual respect for others and for those who disagree, I think what impresses me about your story is that you ran into some Christians who were willing to sit down and invest and engage in your story. Yeah. And I wonder—because that changed your willingness, and so I wonder if you could give some advice to Christians in terms of how to break walls down, how to have meaningful engagement with those who are- There’s this passage in there that says, “Be ready in and out of season to give a reason for your hope, but do it with respect.” And very often Christians forget the last bit. They’re ready to give a reason both without the respect. And I think sometimes before we can start sharing our story we have to get to know the person and give them the space to be and build the relationship with this person and then be respectful all the time. And my own experience, over the last 20 years of being a Christian is, if you are respectful and you meet people where they are, sooner or later, you don’t have to bring up Jesus, they will do it themselves. Because they will want to know, “Why are you like this?” Or, “Why are you helping me?” Or, “Why are you not reacting in the way I expect?” So it’s just getting to know people and being respectful of them. I think that’s huge. There’s a lot to be said about that, especially in today’s culture, where there’s very little listening to the other side. So that’s why I love- You’re too right. Too right. I think you’re spot on there. We think we have all the answers, and in Christ, I believe we do, but we have to give space for the other person to come to a revelation of themselves. I think that is a pearl of wisdom right there, something that’s easier said than done, and I think it’s a really beautiful challenge for all of us, to stop and really consider and give space for the other person. I think you said more than once that you met others who “let me be who I was,” whether it was the friends, the new Christian friends that you had met, or whether it was in the church where you were, as well as the way that you minister to other people. You give them space to be who they are. Yeah. And there’s really something very lovely about that and truly transformational. It gives room for change. It does indeed. So—wow. Mike, what an incredible story. I’m totally inspired. I actually have chill bumps as I’m sitting here. I know that sounds cheesy, but oh, my goodness! What a great, great story. And what a privilege for you to be here and for us all to hear it, so thank you so much for your time and for sharing this bit of yourself in a very vulnerable and transparent way. So, thank you, Mike. I’m honored and privileged. I really am. Fantastic. Thank you. And I love the Welsh accent. Glad to hear that and to have that. So thank you again. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Side B Podcast to hear Mike Arnold’s story. You can learn more about Mike by visiting his Facebook page and website of Long Eaton Baptist Church. I’ll include that 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, please 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.