eX-skeptic

Matt endured a tragic accident that pushed him away from God. In the years that followed, his natural curiosity and search for purpose led him to reconsider the God of the Bible. 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. Sometimes, people move towards God during disappointing life experiences and times of acute tragedy, but sometimes they move further away. Disappointment and tragedy only serve to fuel doubt and disbelief, giving more reason to push and press against a God who doesn’t seem to exist. Many believe the only reason people run to God is for nothing but an emotional crutch, to find a Sky Daddy who will solve all their problems and soothe all of their pain, and as thinking people, they don’t want to succumb to that kind of weakness or superstition, but this way of thinking reduces belief in God to merely its function, what God or religion can do for us, what purpose it serves in our lives. This way of thinking also commits a genetic fallacy. While pain may lead someone to God as the door opener, so to speak, it doesn’t ask the real question of whether or not God is substantively true. That is a different question altogether. In our story today, tragedy did not lead to belief but only further skepticism, but now the one who was a skeptic is a Christian. What was it that changed his mind? How did he move from embittered disbelief to believing not only that God is both true and real but that, as C.S. Lewis says, everything else is thrown in? That’s what we’ll find out. Matt Fincher is our guest today. A former atheist, he will tell his story of how he made his way to God. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Matthew. It’s great to have you! It’s good to be here. As we’re getting started, Matthew, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, perhaps where you live or what you do? I’m Matthew Fincher. I live in North Carolina and have so all my life except for about five months, and I work in insurance and have so for about three years. I know that, at one point, you were an atheist, and that’s where these stories begin, but I want to understand really what shaped those views of atheism, and I know oftentimes it starts way back in your childhood in terms of where you lived and the family and culture that surrounded you. Take me back to when you were a child and talk with me a little bit about your experience of God or not, your family’s beliefs, all of those things. Okay. I grew up in a family that went to church but I don’t believe to be Christian. We went to church every Sunday. My granddad was a solid figure in that church. He taught Sunday school, but we didn’t really go. We just went to the church service. And up until I was about 13 or so, we went to the same church. My parents got divorced around that age, too, and we went to a different church. However, at either of the ones, they were similar preachers, similar styles of service and everything. They had altar calls every week, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do except ask for forgiveness. I knew that I was guilty. And so I would go ask for forgiveness, and sometimes it’d be very intense. I’d have a real understanding of how guilty I was and didn’t know what to do except to ask forgiveness, and I thought that as soon as I committed any kind of sin again, that if I didn’t ask for forgiveness before I died, I’d go to hell. And so that was quite a bit of pressure, especially as you grow up in just a weird culture. I’m pretty sure I was the first generation of people to grow up with cable TV, and it wasn’t really bridled. They put a lot of stuff on there that children my age shouldn’t have seen, even from the age of six or seven or so, and there wasn’t a lot of restraint on any of the stuff culturally, whether it be video games or the movies we watched, but that was the way with me and cable television, video games, and so many things, and I was just influenced so much by the culture that, on the one hand, I knew that I was sinful, and on the other hand, I knew I wanted to get into trouble, whether that be chasing girls or… I started drinking at a very young age. And all throughout high school, I was presented with this dichotomy. It’s like, “I want to do this, but I know this is wrong,” and when I was in the 10th grade, I met a friend who had moved down from Wisconsin, and his family was Catholic, but he had converted to atheism and was a… He supported Communism. And I listened to his arguments. He was a really bright guy, and in kind of different ways than I was. He was more artistic and linguist, and I was more the math/science type person. And it was a nice blend of skills that we could bring together. He introduced me to punk rock and other things like that that I would never hear of were it not for him. And he began to make issue with the church, and he’d actually come with me a few times. We’d hang out over the weekends. One person would hang out at one person’s house for either the Friday or Saturday night. And he found my church different from what he’d been to, to say the least, but he started pointing out atrocities in history of the Roman Catholics. And it’s not that you couldn’t do the same thing for so-called evangelicals. It’s just that the Roman Catholics have a longer history, and in some sense, there’s more to point out about the wrongs that they’ve done. I mean we had a Reformation over that. Some of it’s quite well documented. But when I asked my parents, or my mom at least, about what the difference was between a Roman Catholic and what… I’d tried to find out what denomination we were, and she just said Protestant. I don’t know if she knew. And I asked what the difference was, and she said, “They just have a lot more ritual,” and so I didn’t see any kind of real distinction between Roman Catholics and whatever it is that we were. We went to a Church of God at the time. It wasn’t a denomination. So the further and further I got ingrained into culture, the more I didn’t want to deal with the sinfulness. I became more and more sinful, but I would still pray. I would still try to read the Bible. I think when I was 17 I read through the end of Deuteronomy, and I got to the part… I think it’s around chapter 28, somewhere around there, where it’s like God tells them that they’re not going to succeed at this, and He’s going to have His hand in it, and I thought, “What am I reading this for? He’s showing them that they’re going to fail.” And then I stopped. And it wasn’t long after that I went to college. I’d like to go back for just a moment, before you go to college. This friend that you befriended in high school, it sounds like he had a lot of skepticism about the church. How did that affect your view of God and Christianity at that time? Did it cause some skepticism in you? Or doubt to arise in you? Were you able to ask and ask questions or get answers? What was your mindset around that time? Yeah. That’s good to stop me there. At the time, it was still kind of like… Like you’ve got to be good to get to heaven was the thought, and then that was the prevailing thought going through. Just don’t sin or make sure you ask forgiveness about it. I’d even been baptized when I was around 13 or so. I didn’t even know what it meant. It was just a ritual that you did. So I understood myself to be Christian. I was in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in high school, but so much of it you could see was superficial, and the media’s quick to point out any time some Christian fails at anything, where they can make a public spectacle of it. So combined with the prevailing culture’s attitude toward Christianity and my friend’s skepticism, I couldn’t make sense of how all the things that I wanted, all the bad things I wanted to do, that I got really, really caught up in. That was the main thing I thought about was the next time we were going to go party or I was preparing for it or just… That was really my goal, was just to waste time, for the cleanest phrase I could put forth. But it did come to mind. I didn’t think that there was any kind of personal understanding of God. I don’t mean to say understanding. Experience of God. I just thought it was the kind of thing where He’s up there and we’re down here, and there’s nothing to connect in between. And those seeds of doubt didn’t take me all the way away, but it certainly did have me something to compare to. So, in a sense, you had talked about a dichotomy going on with you, in that you were going through the motions, if you will, of Christianity, but yet it was a superficial kind of Christianity, and you had seeds of doubt, whether or not it was even true. It didn’t seem to fit with your desires and your lifestyle, but yet you had a sense of this moral obligation, this sense of guilt when you did things wrong, so even though your Christianity was somewhat superficial or cultural, you still had these very personal feelings of wrongdoing, I guess you could say, and so that was causing some tension in you. Right. Yeah. Let me just say this. I don’t think I felt guilt when I did the bad things. I think I felt guilt when I went to church. We had to go almost every week. I see. It was a reminder. It was kind of in your face. Yeah. So I’d hear the preacher preach, and I was like, “Man, that’s true. That’d be really good, and we really ought to do that,” and agree with it and understand so much of what he would be saying, but when it’d come to applying it to life, as soon as Monday came, it was right back to being the person that I was the other six days of the week. It was something that you could easily leave behind, so when you went on to college, then, it was probably even easier to leave church behind or Christianity or that Sunday morning reminder of guilt behind. Right. And not only that, it went from… The culture I grew up in with the people I was around was, and I’ll say Christianized with air quotes, like it was still the Christian ethic, if not even the Christian practices. But the media culture that I was in, whether it be video games, we had the internet by that time, albeit very slow, and television were not. And so that presented differences, too. But once I got to college, and this was in late 2001, the regular church service went away. I didn’t have to go. I didn’t deal with that very much. And then the people that I was around, whether it be people in the dorms or classmates or teachers or wherever else was influencing around, were nothing of the sort. It was secular at best, and so much of it was even anti Christian, although there would be campus preachers that would come because it was a public university, and they would make their plea. And I think I listened once. This one guy, he would just come and read the Bible out loud, and he would answer questions, but he never really preached. There was one guy who preached fiercely and seemingly enjoyed the agitation that he could stir up within people, and that wasn’t very appealing, but the one guy, he would just read the Bible. Real nice guy. But I listened to him once. He was there two or three times a week, it would seem like I would pass by him, but that was as much as I had to avoid, and the rest of everything else, whether it be media or the rest of the people around were… It wasn’t promoting the faith, and so much of it was antagonistic. I then got into classes, too, that seemingly supported the kind of things that I’d want to hear to get rid of the guilt that I had. So I didn’t have the regular reminder, and I was studying physics more. You get into science classes, and the evolutionary worldview is assumed rather than questioned. It was to the point where… The things that I did that were wrong, that I knew were wrong, that I felt like I needed to ask forgiveness for, became more prevalent, and the restraint that was pulling me back in that direction was gone, and so it was so much easier to embrace anything that was against that. It was a lot easier to try not to deal with the guilt that I had. I can’t say exactly where because it’s been some time now, but probably around 19, 20 years old or so is when I went into full-on atheism. I didn’t promote it or anything right away, but it was something I think I was coming into. And after that, it just became more easy to do all the immoral things that I wanted to do. Right. So it gave you a moral license without guilt. Right. Now, there were other things, too, that… Like I got into some of the culture of it, like the culture of atheism. Just finding out certain facts that made it easy to fend off anybody that might want to argue with me. I’d been good at arguing my whole life. It’s not something you want to naturally be good at, I don’t think. Or most people wouldn’t, but I was, and so I just pieced together a few facts. And some, I would just assert as if they didn’t have to be argued. Evolution was one of them. I wasn’t sure about it. They taught it to us in high school. And so I’d already embraced the evolution of the species, and then I would find out in physics about the expanding universe, and now I think more so that’s something on our side that we can use to defend, rather than something that helps the- Yeah. The expanding universe confirms the reality of an initial big bang, as it were. A singularity at the beginning of the universe. Right. Well God also says He stretches out the heavens, so I’d take the expanding universe. I would just presuppose evolution. I would put that the Bible had been translated so many times, so we couldn’t really know whether it was true or not. I mean I sounded like a professional. And the one that got me the best that I would save for last that I thought was my best attack on the faith was, you know, we’ve got 800,000 species of insects, and this shows that Noah put every single thing on the ark in twos, and it was like I don’t think that he really had 1.6 million different little insects there in male and female and then set them all off the ark. Now I’ve got different arguments as opposed to that now and everything, but that would really blow people’s mind when I would start defending myself. So they’d either at least have some chink of skepticism in their armor if they wouldn’t respond. Or maybe they didn’t. They just didn’t want to argue with a hothead like me. I didn’t really take that into account. Or I’d leave justified, but either way, they wouldn’t talk or they would lose the argument. So no one could respond to your intellectual arguments for atheism. Right. And so I felt all the more rigorous and justified in my own unbelief, or my own belief in atheism. It is a kind of a faith. I didn’t always go out looking to be like that, but… Another thing I could point out too was the inconsistencies in people who named themselves Christian. I didn’t really go out starting fights, but when somebody would use that as a crutch in conversation or just even mention Christianity or Jesus or anything like that, or a belief in God, then it might… I view it now like now triggered, like I would just want to fight back about that and then start tearing down the walls of somebody’s faith. It’s just like so much of what we see now. I just wanted it removed from public discourse. Like, “You can believe this on your own, but I don’t want you talking about it around me kind of thing.” Right. Right. It wasn’t true. Science had disproved it. It wasn’t good. You’re hypocritical. The atrocities of the church. All of these things. The corruption of the Bible. It’s just that you showed Christianity to be rather weak compared to the strength of your intellectual atheism. Right. And my theory on the people who were Christians, apart from a within-the-church kind of view, it looked to me… Like, I just examined the ten commandments, and after you get through the first four, it just seemed like something was set up to keep the people in power in power. And some of the Communism had had leaked through made that kind of impression seemingly. “Don’t want my stuff. Don’t take my wife. Don’t steal from me.” I couldn’t make sense of all of it, but that was enough for me to think that there was some kind of motivation to keep people in line. And I didn’t look much further into that. I theorized it, and then I’d heard some other people… Maybe not directly, people in person. I read something or heard something somewhere. That made enough sense to me to keep the belief, and from the personal perspective, it just seemed like, to me, a way to not have to make explanations for things. I was just so enamored with all the wonderful things that I was learning that it seemed to me that if you didn’t want this, what I knew, that I found to be so wonderful, then you were just being lazy. And I can do this now, too, even as a Christian. You find sometimes in life things are so hard to explain that you don’t know what to say. Sometimes we’ll just… We don’t want to push people through their own difficulty. You can see something’s difficult for somebody and say, “Well, I’ll pray for you about that,” or see something so tough, but when I would hear people say, when I was younger, “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” it seemed like such a cop-out. As if… If something favorable to you happens, then, “Oh, the Lord is so good,” and then, if you couldn’t explain or something bad to you happens, it’s like, “Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways,” seemed to be the explanation for all of it. That there wasn’t anything within the bounds that could happen to you that couldn’t be explained by one pithy phrase about how God’s working in this. And that just seemed to be so intellectually lazy that I didn’t want to have that to be the explanation for what I had. Now I couldn’t offer any better explanation for why bad things happen to good people seemingly, but that was a tough one for me. Matthew, it sounds like you had a lot of things going on. You had become a militant atheist. It seems like you had a lot of contempt for Christianity and God in your life, and I presume that this affected your lifestyle, and I just wondered how your atheism affected the way that you lived. Right. Well, not only was there the culture in school, the absence of the church kind of being that moral balance to combat, so much of what I wanted to believe… There was an experience I had when I was 20. I had come back from an internship as an engineer and was in school over the summer, and for the Fourth of July holiday I went back to my roommate’s hometown. I was at a point where I was very low. I didn’t know what to do. I recognized that I had a problem with alcohol and drugs and was starting to see a counselor about it, and his thoughts… And I think he kind of knew, but he just couldn’t say. Some people won’t take certain things, no matter whether they’re true or not, just because they’re so hard to believe. Or they cost too much to believe. And I think that’s what happens with people a lot of times when you try to present Christianity to them. It’s a harder truth than what he was telling me. I went because I was depressed. I just didn’t have a whole lot of hope, whole lot of joy, and this was already by the time I was 20, so this is before any kind of militant atheism. This was just kind of the seedling phase. But I went to this counselor, and he said, “Perhaps it’s that you’re depressed and that you drink and do drugs because of this. Or it could be that these are the things that are causing you to be depressed, and the way we can put a control on this is by having you stop,” so he agreed to have me stop for 45 days, and at the time, I was into alcohol and marijuana and some other drugs, too, but those were the main two. Those were the only two I had any kind of possession of. And so I’d agreed to have one more time with each, and so I finished the marijuana that I had. And I planned to go back to my roommate’s hometown for the Fourth of July. There was this pretty girl that I had seen there before that wanted to meet me again, and I didn’t want to go back and not be cool by not drinking. And so I was saving that day to drink. But in the 30 days or so leading up to that time, I was having such a good time. I got back into being active and running. I was an athlete all through high school, too. So I think I’d even quit smoking. I still smoked cigarettes then. So this day comes along, and I’m going back. I never did end up running into the girl, but we also started drinking around noon, and by 5:00, I’m drunk. I didn’t drink for 30 days, and I don’t know how many beers I drank, but it was a lot. More than normal, and I’d lowered my tolerance by not drinking for several days beforehand. And somewhere I began to lose memory. We went to several different places, but I woke up in the hospital, and I was on all kinds of drugs, I’m sure. I later met a doctor of pharmacology that said, “If you go into a coma, even if you would remember anything, they put you on drugs, so that you won’t remember anything.” So I didn’t remember a whole lot about what happened, but I looked down, and my left leg had been amputated. And just knowing how bad off I was, with drugs and alcohol and trying to be cool, I thought… I mean I’d been in so many car wrecks already by then that I was like, “Well, that’s the kind that can happen doing the kind of things that I did.” And didn’t really question too much the fault of the matter, what had went on. It was like, “I mean, I’m sure that something bad happened and that it was my fault. I was the one getting drunk.” Now, I don’t doubt that something else contributed to it. There may or may not have been any kind of foul play, but from what I can gather, I got hit by a truck going about 75 miles an hour that hit me as a pedestrian. I don’t know if I was standing or lying or sitting or what. I don’t know. And I feel bad for the guy that hit me. I ended up being in the hospital for a month. I had a lot of surgeries, a lot of staples, but I was a pretty cheerful patient. I had family all around. I think so many people were just glad that I lived, and for me, the experience was I went out partying one night, knowing I shouldn’t really do it, and then I woke up in the hospital. And I had some tough experiences there, the additional surgeries that went on, but to me, it was just like, “How am I going to get back to normal now?” That was more the focus for me. “How do I get up and get moving?” That seemed to me the harder thing than to deal with what actually happened. But, being proud as I was, it seemed like the kind of thing… I was like, “Man, I’ve been through so many wrecks and a bunch of fights and just a bunch of dumb stuff.” It didn’t seem like I could die, and that didn’t fit anywhere into an atheistic worldview. And then there’d be people that would come and visit me that I hardly knew. I mean I kind of know but… They just had been praying for me at different churches from around the community. And I’d hear about that, and I’d dismiss it, and I’d hear about it, and I’d dismiss it, and I’d hear about it, and I’d dismiss it. And it just seemed to me like I was a medical anomaly. That was the easiest way to explain it, than some kind of miracle, like people were exclaiming. That is, for you, it wasn’t something that you all of a sudden opened up and said, after this tragedy, “Oh, I believe in God, and this was a miracle.” No, not at all. You were actually pushing farther away or still- Yeah. I was like, “I just had good doctors,” is the way I thought about it. And that was so tough for so many people at the time. Not only did they see something they thought to be genuine, this is me putting my thoughts into their head. Nobody’s told me this. But at the same time, I’m like, “Oh, it’s okay,” and just discounting it. Not that I wasn’t a cheerful hospital patient or anything like that. I think so much of it was just shielding the difficulty of all that I know was to come. I mean it was a lot of pain and still is a lot of times, but- I can’t imagine. Truly can’t imagine. Yeah, but it’s bearable. And it’s a lot more bearable to know that I contributed to this. We have a tendency, and I say “we.” You may not be included in this “we.” You or anybody that would hear this. To want to be pitiful about a plight in our life. And God’s done good enough for me that the most difficult things that I have to deal with in my life, this being one of them, was that they’re my fault. And so I can’t go to, “Well, look at all the bad things that happened to me.” It’s like, “No, look at the bad I caused myself,” and so I kind of just get to gloss over the whole pitiful part. I can feel sad for a minute, but I’ve got to figure out a better way or just rest until we get the proper thing fixed or the proper remedy of what the situation is, or proper diagnosis. So it sounds like you became rather convinced of and ingrained in your atheism. So what was next in your journey that perhaps caused you to either push further into atheism or turn towards God? I’m thinking I’m about 22, 23 when it goes not just into a passive and then occasionally combative to like a militant atheism. At the breath of the opportunity, I would make a point to do it. And it didn’t matter with whom. People I would work with, family members, even my own grandmother. It was terrible. One of them, not both. But one of them, I was just like, “Look, we don’t have any explanation for this,” and she said, “I’m still believing in God. I don’t care what you say,” but that’s just the extreme example. Like why would you do that to your grandmother? I was corrupt. Yeah. Just awful. And something that I heard… I wish I could remember the scholar. I can’t remember who it was, but he ended up being converted, but he said he was the kind of atheist, he had to be so smart to be so dumb. God’s fingerprint is on so many things and everything in life, but if you’re so pleased with your own atheism, you have to stop looking at the pieces of the world that have God’s fingerprint on it until you retreat and you retreat and you retreat and the only thing you can kind of be pleased with is your own thought of atheism. And that’s just a sad world to live in. I don’t think I got all the way there, but I got very close. And it was just such a sad existence. It’s just so much complaint, anger, and I just really was not a very happy person at all. And when you’re a militant atheist, you have nothing to live for but that, and after a while, that becomes so terrible that you try to find some other purpose in life. And I couldn’t find anything to live for. I thought about… And I’m probably not as good of a scientist as I’d like to think, but I thought, “Maybe I can just do that,” maybe I could just go do science somewhere. “Can I really live somewhere out in the woods and just conduct experiments or something, like Tesla or something.” That’s way too proud of me to think that I could do stuff like that, but it was an option I was examining. Another thing we looked at… I was trying to figure out what we could do, like, “Man, things seem so terrible. What could we live to do something worth doing?” And I thought, “Maybe we could try to make humanity more efficient.” I still kind of had the engineering mindset, and I thought that making humanity more efficient, at least… It seems like there’s so much waste, and I think that’s probably still some of the leftovers of dabbling in Communism that brought about, but I wanted to just have humanity be better. And I didn’t even have a good definition of better, but the area of history that my friend had been influenced by so much was the Roman period, and we had come to the conclusion that having one currency, one language, and one government would make things a lot more efficient and cut out a lot of waste. So adjacent to that is the whole scare of 2012, and for those who don’t know or don’t remember, it was the worry that there was going to be some kind of big asteroid to come and hit or just the end of mankind in some kind of way. So I really thought that we were coming to the end, and I wanted to try to make things better before then. I told my brother about this. So I thought that I can check out and see if the Bible is really true about this, and so I started reading Revelation. So, Matthew, you started to read the Bible. You started reading Revelation. What were you finding there? Were you finding the answers that you were looking for? No, not at all. I didn’t find the answers I was looking for, but I did find some answers. It really was like something had gone on that, for some reason, when I picked up the pages of Revelation, I immediately thought, like, “Man, this is true!” I did think that the things that I saw in there seemingly corresponded to what was happening at the time. I don’t think so now so much. The world obviously did not end in 2012. But some of the stuff seemed to fit, but no matter the rest, I continued to read on and just reading that book and went from book to book to book after that of the Bible. Not necessarily in any kind of order or anything. I just… Something happened where I was like, “This is the truth.” It wasn’t any kind of reasoning involved in it, which was weird. It was just as if the internal voice you have, I don’t know. I hear there’s people that don’t have an internal voice when they think. But I do. And I think most of us do. And it was just like, “This is the truth!” And it didn’t make any sense because everything I’d kind of positioned myself in life was antagonistic to it, but I kept reading. And weird things started happening. The moral arguing is finally what got to me. I just couldn’t grasp that there wasn’t anything that we could that was wrong. I could push out to the thoughts of some of the worst things that could happen to someone or someone else, and I was like, “That’s definitely wrong, and I don’t have any answer for why it’s- So you started becoming skeptical about your own atheism? Right. I kind of pushed back into agnosticism. I think I skipped over being there for a long… For probably a year or so after high school, I branched into being agnostic. It was just a cheap way of saying you’re an atheist that doesn’t want to obey anything. Now I’m sorry for any agnostics that I offended. It’s just like, “I don’t want to obey any rules, but I don’t want to say that I know anything.” Or at least that was how it was for me. But then I got pushed back. It’s like, “Maybe I really don’t know,” and then I couldn’t get over the idea of morality. I knew that some things I did were wrong, and I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t explain having a conscience. And that was a thing I tried so hard to explain away, and I couldn’t do it. So I started praying. I remember… It’s just so weird. God answered some prayers when I was 17, and there’s no way it couldn’t have been an answer to prayer because the exact opposite of the thing happened the day before and then the thing that I was praying for kind of just turned itself upside down the next day. And I don’t know why I could avoid that happening. Why I couldn’t keep that out of my memory, but it came back to me around this same time. It’s like, “Man, I used to pray when I was younger, and I used to get prayers answered. I should start praying again.” But I was praying to anything but the Christian God, with all His rules and all His bad history. So I started praying to just weird stuff, the sun, the moon, the stars, all manner of idolatry, but I kept praying, just kept praying for God to show itself or Himself to me and had run out of ways to try to pray to something that I could make up. Around this time, things had just got so bad in my life. I wasn’t fully employable. And this is the end of 2008. I didn’t pick the Bible back up for some time, right after that, but I did continue on praying, and it was so weird, I’d begun again to try to stop drinking and stop doing drugs. I knew I was going to have to get some kind of different job. I was trying to move back to my hometown. And this was at the height of the previous recession, when nobody knew whether we were going to make it out of it or whether we’d be able to have jobs. I ended up moving, not in with my parents but into an apartment somehow, and… Before all this happened, I was going into my morning routine, and I’d already come to understand the Bible as true. I wasn’t reading it still, but I was still praying. I still didn’t want to believe that the God of the Bible was the one that was making the truth the truth. But the conclusion came to me… It’s like when you read about the prodigal in Luke 15. It said he came to himself. That is exactly what happened to me. I came to myself in understanding that everything I wanted was a sin. All I wanted to do was to drink and do drugs and chase skirts and just do a bunch of other bad things. And so I came to the realization, like, “Everything I want’s a sin. All I ever want to do is sin.” And I just fell down weeping, and I said, “I’ll do whatever You want. I knew it was God there with me at that time.” It was so weird. And I started throwing out CDs that I knew I shouldn’t have and books. I had all kind of manner of terrible books. Music I shouldn’t be listening to. And within a month, I’d moved home to that apartment and started going to church. My dad would take me to church. In the same way that, when I read the Bible, I knew it to be the truth this time around, it’s as if what the preacher was telling me was the truth. It’s like, “Well, why doesn’t somebody tell people that these guys are telling the truth?” I couldn’t understand. This really was the whole change of things. It really was like being a new person. Like you had new eyes to see or ears to hear. And ears to hear, yeah. And I just continued on going to church ever since. It was just such a weird experience of it. I picked up and read more and more of the Bible. I was reading other materials along with it. And just really soaking up the faith. It was just such a good thing. So how has your life changed? Obviously, again, it looked like you had a new perspective on life and living, and I presume that it really affected your life. As an atheist, you spoke of anger. You spoke of depression. And those kinds of things. How was your life affected after you became a Christian? I had a morality to adhere to. I had some kind of purpose, what I lacked before. And life had meaning. So much, even my goals and stuff changed. Immediately, I wanted to be a part of a family and have a wife and children… Just so much of what society sits upon. I wanted to be a part of that. I became so normal. So normal! I just enjoyed my idea of being a radical for so long, and then when I became a Christian, it was like, “Man, this is really normal.” But it was still… I think it would be boring [UNKNOWN 46:30] the thought on becoming a Christian. It just seemed like, “Man, it’s just got to be so boring! You don’t get to do any of the wild, fun stuff I like to do.” But it’s been so much more wild being a Christian. I’ve been on a lot more adventures, however small or large, since then. It seems like it happens all the time, just even everyday events can be like that. So much of what we see now… Those who would oppose Christianity want so many of the same things that we have, just in a different way. I had a community to be a part of. It’s like a network of something that was other than just a bunch of bad people that were tripping over their own feet metaphorically in life all the time. And I had something to which to progress. Just trying to be like Christ is such a hard thing sometimes. But it’s in a different way, I presume than the Christianity you knew as a child, where you had to be good. This is a different kind of thing, to be like Christ. You have so much good to say. I wish we had more time in the podcast to do that. So, Matthew, it sounds like your life has changed dramatically, and you were just speaking a moment ago about those who opposed Christianity, or those nonbelievers who sometimes actually are looking for similar things but in a different way or in a different direction. If you were able to speak to the skeptic or the curious nonbeliever, what would you say to them? Oh, I’d say I’d really examine the motivations that you have for your atheism. Is it really the evidence is really that you want to produce your own ethic? That’s what I find with me and with so many of the atheists that I run into or encounter who’ve come from atheism in the same way. “If this were true, then this would cost me this,” really is the hindrance to come into the faith, rather than, “These other arguments are so convincing,” and some of them very well may be as far as the scientific arguments against the faith if you don’t have the counter to them. But what I would do is to examine your motivations for this. Are they really scientific or are they ethical? And then to find out for yourself about this. I would recommend reading the Bible and just trying to understand more about what the gospel is. The term is used so much in Christian culture it’s almost lost any effect, but it really is the good news that we live in a fallen world, where sin has corrupted everything. Everything that was to be good is now not as good. And some of the things are not even good the all. And to remedy that, to show how loving God is, He sent His Son to die. He lived a perfect life. He rose from the dead, and it’s really just believing that that brings us into this family, to His family where we’re redeemed, where we can see that this church, this bride of His, is really the whole purpose for creation. So often it’s, “Why did God make the world? Why did God not make the world perfect?” God could have made a perfect world and did. And then it’s better for people to have the choice to live in it with freedom or not, and so He did so, and in their choice, they corrupted it. And yet, in His great love, he chose to redeem it. We could have just been like the angels and got the justice we deserved, but to show loving He is, He’s redeemed us, and one of the ways you can hear that is by hearing this gospel. This news is that you don’t have to face Him on your own account. You don’t have to deal with your own ethical problems. They can be resolved by faith in Jesus and faith that He’s come, that he’s overcome the power of death, and that it can be for you, too. Also, if you could find a church that believes the Bible, I would participate in it. The way that people come to understand this is just by hearing the word of God, and it really is something supernatural that occurs. You want to think that it’s just a deduction and reasoning, but it really is something beyond what we would think that really happens. It really is a change of heart, a change from stone to flesh. And then, I know there’s got to be, into the spectrum of ethics in atheism, too. Don’t be like I was. You’ll so much regret it if you really do try to unconvert people from Christianity. Whether or not you come to the faith. It’s such a hard way to live, and if you find something in this world to delight in, I’d hope it would be the Lord. If not, let it not be atheism. That’s wonderful, Matthew. How about some advice to Christians who perhaps don’t understand those who push away from God or want to engage with atheists. What advice would you have for them? Okay, I would pick up a book from Paul David Tripp. It’s on counseling, but I apply it directly to evangelism, too. It’s called Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands. It talks about, when you’re trying to tell people difficult things, so often they’re not going to listen to you unless you get to know them. Although we encounter people here and there that we’re only going to see once, but in those instances, try to pray that the Lord would open up a door for the gospel. In a sense where it’s somebody you know, then try to get to know them and try to let them get to know that you love them, that you care about them, in whatever way that you can. It’s so much easier to hear hard truths from somebody that you know loves you than somebody that doesn’t. And then only after that do I try to help people to understand the gospel and just hope that the Lord opens up the door for it. And then, too, I know we’re on a podcast about people being converted from atheism, but in a sense of what we do in apologetics, the stuff that I subscribe to, or at least the school of which is presuppositional, and that’s a longer word than it should be, but I really do think that presupposing that people are hostile to the truth and that really the only thing that’s going to help them out is either seeing the truth through the Bible or having their ears opened up is what’s going to happen. But at the same time too, we should have an answer for the hope that’s in us, and if it’s just telling, “This is what happened to me,” that’s perfectly fine. But just expect, at points in times, that you’re going to fail. You’re going to be too scared. You’re going to have the fear of man. But that doesn’t mean it has to be the end. We can keep going to let the world know that we really do have the truth and we really do have the message of redemption that the world needs. That’s really good advice all the way around. Well, thank you, Matthew, for being part of the Side B Podcast. It’s an extraordinary story. It has so much in it in terms of the reasons why you pushed back against God intellectually, emotionally, morally, experientially. So many ways in your life that you were pushing back against God, but I guess He was not pushing back against you. That somehow, through God, your eyes were opened, and you found the love and care of God, the truth of God through His word, and that your life has been completely transformed. What a beautiful story, and thank you so much for coming on to share it. It’s been a pleasure for me, too. Being asked about this, it’s like I do want to be able to do what is expected of us in Romans, to confess with our mouth, as I do believe in my heart. Thanks for joining me today on the Side B Podcast to hear Matthew’s story. You can follow him on Instagram at @PatrickHenry007. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me via email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, 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.

Former skeptic Craig thought he was too intelligent to believe in God, but after a series of sobering events, he was shocked to find himself affirming the truth of Christ. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life, more specifically where an atheist unexpected becomes a Christian. There’s something fascinating about dramatic life change, when someone becomes entirely different than they were before, in the way they think and act, in the way they see and live life, their perspectives and purposes completely changed. This kind of life transformation not only surprises the people around them, but it often stuns even the one who was changed, for they never saw it coming. Most atheists never consider even a remote possibility of believing in God, much less becoming a passionate follower of Jesus Christ, and yet, it actually can and does happen. But that kind of radical change takes everyone off guard and raises a sense of curiosity. It causes everyone to wonder how someone could shift their understanding of themselves and the world in such a striking and powerful way. What happened? More importantly, why did it happen? In our story today, Craig Northwood found himself on the other side of a tremendous paradigm shift ten years ago, moving from a self-described atheist, alcoholic, drug user, and fairly unpleasant character, to someone who now passionately proclaims his Christian faith as both real and true. In fact, he has made this his life’s mission as a Christian pastor and apologist, now running an apologetics organization, and we’ll let him tell us about all of that. But that’s quite a change. Let’s take a listen to see what prompted this startling transformation, why it happened, and how his life has changed? Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Craig. It’s so great to have you. It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Yes, absolutely! Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, where we can locate that wonderful dialect of yours? My Welsh accent, which I try to cover up. Yes. My name’s Craig, as you know, Craig Northwood. I live in South Wales. I live in a little town at the moment called Ystrad Mynach, which almost sounds like you’re trying to clear your throat or something. I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in a slightly larger town in South Wales. I’ve been a Christian for… I actually realized this today. I’ve been a Christian for… I was actually saved ten years ago this week, but I only realized that earlier today, which was a nice way to spend my anniversary, I suppose. Yes, it is! I’m looking forward to really unraveling that story and what happened prior to your conversion because obviously I think there’s a lot to it, and I’m just excited to know your story. So why don’t we start back in your childhood, really. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about where you grew up, your family, and whether or not religion was on the radar or in the picture at all in your culture and in your family? Okay. I did grow up in South Wales. I’m from a fairly large family. I have two brothers and two sisters. And religion wasn’t really a large part of when I was growing up. My parents did occasionally take us to church when I was quite young. I’ve got a vague recollection that my mother was hurt by somebody in the church, but I think I was about ten when we stopped going, if that, so it’s all quite a distant memory, really. My mother continued to believe. My father kind of continued to believe, I think, in some sense, but they were never active in the church. They never really went on a regular basis. We certainly never went on a regular basis, and as I was growing up, I didn’t really have anything to do with Christianity. My elder brother and sister did for a short time. They went to Christian youth groups, but they kind of drifted away, and I didn’t really have any interest in Christianity, and then, as I was growing up, I kind of got to my teenage years, and I was sort of cursed with this idea that I was very clever, and I now know that I wasn’t particularly clever. I was just interested in things that clever people do and clever people write about, but I thought I was very clever, so that kind of made me extremely arrogant, unfortunately, so as far as I was concerned, I was very much thinking along the same sort of lines as New Atheism, where if you can’t prove it scientifically to me, then it’s obviously rubbish, so I didn’t have any time for Christianity, and as I got older, that became more and more pronounced, so I wasn’t very pleasant towards anyone with any sort of religious belief, really. Okay. Would you consider South Wales and where you grew up… Was it nominally Christian? Would you say that there was very much of a Christian influence? Were there friends in your culture that had what you would consider any kind of real faith at all? No. No, not really at all. I think, South Wales in particular now, it’s very secular. I knew very few people who were Christians as I was growing up. I don’t know if that was just because we weren’t plugged into that bit of the culture, but very, very rarely would I meet anybody who would identify as a Christian. The UK is not a particularly Christian country, I think. I think we’re seeing a bit of a resurgence in big cities now, but you tend to find the older generation, especially where I’ve lived, the older generation would be more inclined towards going to church but certainly not in my age group, so I wasn’t really exposed to a great deal of Christianity. And when your brother and sister went to youth group, was it just more of an activity, you think? There was no real connection with it there, either? I’m not really sure. I think because I wasn’t interested in it, I never really took in whether or not they were that serious about it. I know that I used to play role-playing games… You know Dungeons & Dragons and all of that kind of thing? When I was a teenager, I used to play those quite a lot, and my sister was convinced that this was basically the work of the Antichrist invading my life, and Satan was going to come and take me away because I was interested in these games, and she used to give me these dreadful pamphlets about how evil role-playing games were and things. In a sense, looking back on them now, some of it can be a little bit dark, I suppose, but that was my only experience of it, was my sister giving me, as a teenager, these dreadful pamphlets, and me just thinking, “You must be kidding. You don’t really believe this, do you?” So that, in a sense, probably drove me a little bit further away. Yeah. So it probably put you off towards the moralism of religion and that sort of thing. So when you were embracing atheistic thought, you were reading? Were you reading some atheistic literature or listening to some of the New Atheists? I think a little bit. I mean, when I was a teenager, you know, the internet wasn’t really a thing. I think it was just kind of getting up and running, so I wasn’t really exposed to any kind of atheist social media or anything like that. And I was a big fiction reader, but I wasn’t much of a reader of anything along those… I was kind of aware of Richard Dawkins, and I think I might have had one of his books which I kind of flipped through a bit, but the little bits that I looked at, I just… It kind of resonated with me, and I thought, “Yes, yes, this is all….” I was still in my extremely arrogant phase, and I was like, “Yes, yes. I know all of this. Yes, the God of the Bible is really, really bad and horrible,” and I didn’t actually know anything about it. Looking back on it now, I didn’t really know anything about Christianity, but I kind of made all these assumptions and had all these ideas about, you know, the crusades and hypocrisy and the Catholic Church covering up all these things, and all kind of business. And I just kind of removed myself from it in that way, really. So it wasn’t so much a case of studying it and coming to that conclusion. I just kind of was very unpleasant, as I said. So yes. There’s sometimes just a general presumption about Christians and Christianity, whether it be institutional or just the church or the people associated with it. You had mentioned a lot of negative attributes that you attributed to people who believed in religion and faith and I guess particularly coming from a place of being clever or one of the brights or however you wanted to see yourself. It was probably a relatively easy place to be. When you’re in a position of presuming one position and then there’s someone else over there that you’re presuming who they are, would you say that there are a lot of… Like you said, you hadn’t really investigated it. It was just something you presumed. Kind of a default position, if you will, because it served your purposes in a sense, would you say? Yeah, yeah. Very much. I think I was just more comfortable with the idea of thinking that I knew better than people and thinking that I understood things better than they did. And in my mind, it was probably more trouble than it was worth investigating it because, as far as I was concerned, I’d made up my mind, anyway, that they were wrong and I was right. So I would just kind of distance myself from anything like that, really. Yeah. Sometimes I’m very interested in the idea of dismissing or dismissing Christianity, and that’s one thing, but sometimes it seems that, among those who dismiss it, are also a bit contemptuous of it, I guess you could say. Yes. What do you suppose fuels a contemptuousness for faith and religion and Christianity? That’s a very good question. I mean I think that could go any number of ways. From my personal perspective, at the risk of sort of repeating myself, because I was under this impression that I was very clever, because I was very arrogant and very full of myself, people who believed something that I thought I understood better than… I thought I understood things better than them, so to me they were just ignorant and just blind and just… I used to think anybody that was religious was really stupid, which is a horrible thing to think, really. But yeah, yeah. I think it was just kind of a self superiority from my perspective. I know obviously that wouldn’t be the case for everybody. So there was a sense of rational superiority in a sense. Yeah. So this was in, you said, your teenage years, in high school. Yes. Did you have friends that believed similarly to you? Or was this kind of something that you just decided, and in an independent way, just forged through and decided you were an atheist? I can remember one specific conversation, actually. A few of us were sitting around one morning just before school, waiting for the register to be taken, and one guy in my group started saying something about how he had been told or he had read somewhere or something that the idea of the devil was made up in the Middle Ages and it was just Old English for evil, and God was basically just Old English for good and just coming out with this absolute nonsense, but because I was coming to a point in my life where I wanted to believe this kind of thing, I seized on this, and I think, in a strange way, this accelerated the speed at which I distanced myself from Christianity, and I looked down more and more on people who were Christians, because I seized on this idea that it had all been made up in the Middle Ages as some sort of control or something like that. And I just kind of ran with that. And it didn’t occur to me to investigate it or to ask anybody about it or to wonder whether or not wherever he got this information from was reliable. It was basically just feeding my prejudice. It fed into my biases, and I think that can be a case with a lot of people, Christian and non-Christian. I wouldn’t want to pigeonhole anybody. I think that it’s very easy to be given something that confirms what we already think and just run with it and have no regard whatsoever for the possibility that it might not be correct. But yeah, I was especially prone to that when I was younger, so that probably sped me along somewhat. Yeah, I think we’re all guilty of confirmation bias- Confirmation bias. That was what I was trying to think of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In many regards, we oftentimes live in an echo chamber of hearing the things we want to hear. I heard you say, “I wanted to believe it.” I did. So it’s easy to grab onto something that seems to confirm your perspective, and it really takes a lot, I think, to get beyond your bubble, in a sense, and to really see reality and be willing to investigate and hear both sides of the story. So I think we’re all guilty of that in certain ways at different times in our lives. So you wanted to believe atheism, and you grabbed hold of it, and you ran with it, and so this was when you were still in high school. So walk us along from here. From there, then, I went on to college and surrounded myself probably with quite similar people. I’m not sure how familiar you are with sort of how our education system plays out. So our high school finishes sort of at 16 and then you do something called A levels, which is like pre-university education, so I did an A level, then, in philosophy, and that… You would’ve thought that that would have opened my mind up a little bit, and you would’ve hoped that I would have sort of gathered a little bit more critical thinking skills and started to question things and my own beliefs properly, but all I really did was… Any element of religious philosophy that was included in that… I mean it wasn’t in any way particularly an in-depth course. I was 17, 18 years old, and it was just kind of a… I’d never really looked at philosophy before. But again, feeding into my own kind of arrogance, I thought, “Well, this will make me sound clever to people, if I’m doing this A level in philosophy.” So any religious philosophy element that was there, I would just sort of look at the traditional arguments for God, and then I’d be far more interested in the ways they could be refuted. and I’d be far more interested in the counter arguments than I was in the arguments for. So I finished that. I then went to university very briefly, then. I think I was there for three or four months, and I was doing a joint degree in English and philosophy, literature and philosophy. I left there then. I decided after a few months I didn’t want to do humanities. I wanted to do a science. So I wanted to do a physics degree. That’s what I really wanted. But some circumstances, through a number of circumstances, really, I then didn’t end up going back to university. So I got a not particularly fulfilling job. I kind of drifted about a bit. I wandered from this thing to that thing. And I was drinking more and more heavily at this point. I think, you know, the majority of teenagers experiment with alcohol, and I was kind of the one in the group who people would occasionally say, “Oh, you’re a bit fond of your drink, aren’t you?” And sort of hint in that kind of direction. But I obviously didn’t take any notice of that. But as I was reaching my early twenties, I was just drinking more and more. I started playing in bands. I was more and more involved in the drinking kind of culture. And through my twenties, then, I became more unpleasant. I became more arrogant. I became more contemptuous of people who had any sort of religious belief. I became more convinced of my own superiority, and then, as I got towards sort of my thirties, it sort of turned from being somebody who drinks too much and people occasionally pointing it out to occasionally needing a drink first thing in the morning to kind of steady myself a little bit, you know? To try and sort of feel a bit better from the night before, so that I could go into work. My parents then divorced when I was in my early thirties, and about the same time, I had a blood clot on my brain. Oh, my! And we only discovered this when I started having seizures, so I developed epilepsy. They sent me for MRI scan, which discovered the clot on my brain. This made me, as you’d imagine, particularly ill. Foolishly, I started… I was then off work sick for some months before I had an operation to remove it, and when I had the operation, they said to me, “You need to stay off work now for at least…” I think it was six months they gave me, so I was in the position where I was sitting around the house. I was still being paid for period… I was still being fully paid for a period of my sick leave, so I was sitting around the house on my own, very full of myself, with a gradually accelerating drink problem, and with money coming in, so from there on, it was just rapidly downhill, and I then got to the stage where I was… It got to the point where I would literally lose a week to two weeks at a time, and I wouldn’t know where I’d been or what I’d done. I was living with my mother by this point. I was sort of a thirty-something-year-old guy living with my mother, sitting in the spare room all day, drinking cheap vodka. I’d lost my job. I was living on benefits. My poor mother doing her best to just basically try and get me to see that I needed help. And at this point, because I was drinking so much, this point is a little bit hazy in my memory, but I’ll do my best to piece it together. So at this point two people… I can’t remember how the meeting came about, but a couple dear friends of mine, a couple by the name of Faye and Kenny Brandy. They were from Scotland originally. They came around to my house, and they came around to tell me about how Jesus had freed them both from a life of crime and heroin addiction. And I was a little bit full of myself during this meeting, sitting there with a large vodka in my hand, listening to them talk, and I would sort of give them difficult questions, and they were so loving and so gracious, and they did their best, and they were there for a long time, and eventually they left, and before they left, they gave me a number, and they said, “We work for a Christian rehabilitation unit,” and they said, “If you need help, we will help you.” And, to me, that just absolutely… and I never would have admitted it at the time, and I wouldn’t have admitted it for a long time after, but to me, that was just the most unbelievable thing, that these people who I had never met before had come to my house and dealt with me sitting there being extremely rude and extremely arrogant, to their faces, while they were trying to tell me about how Jesus had changed their lives and offering to help me, and… There was a bit of me that wanted them to just get fed up with me and leave and never come back, but to close out our meeting with, “If you want help, we will help you,” that really struck a chord with me. And it was some weeks before I eventually phoned them, and I just said, “I do need help. Please help me.” So I went into the rehab, but I still went in with this idea, “You’re all deluded. You’re all idiots. I know better than you. I’m going to go into this rehab for a few weeks and get myself off the drink, and then I’m going to go, and I don’t want any of your Bible stuff, and I don’t want any of your Jesus nonsense, and I don’t want any of you preaching at me or anything like that.” Wow! Craig, when you were in this place, obviously you knew you needed help physically, and you were willing to submit, even in a Christian environment, to whatever nonsense they had if they could help you with your addiction, withdrawal, or you know. I wonder, in those months and those weeks where you were isolated, sitting by yourself, and I know you had said you hadn’t really known or investigated much about Christianity. You just had kind of an animus towards it. Had you really thought about—especially through your blood clot on your brain, that surgery, and all of that—did you really confront what death was or meaning in life as you were sitting there within an atheist worldview? Did you contemplate your own naturalistic atheism and what that meant for your life at all? Honestly, no. And you would think that I would. You would think that something like that would cause somebody to sit back and take notice, but I think I’d been drinking so much by this point… At this point in my life, probably partly due to the amount that I was drinking, but I was just ridiculously depressed. By the time I went for the operation, I wasn’t particularly concerned about whether or not I would survive it, which is awful, looking back on it, but I was just very disinterested in anything, so I think the neurosurgeon… I went to meet him before the operation, and he sort of laid out everything, and he explained the risks and everything like that, and he said, “Do you have any questions?” And I just said, “No, not really,” and I think that surprised him because I think the majority of people probably would have had something they wanted to talk about, some questions that they wanted to know about possibly their chances of coming out of this unscathed or something, but I didn’t really care, and I continued to not care after I came out. I didn’t really care when I lost my job. I didn’t really care when all of my friends just kind of gradually gave up on me. I didn’t really care about anything. So I wasn’t really questioning anything. I was just kind of sitting there and drinking, and I wasn’t really thinking anything past my next bottle of cheap vodka, to be honest. Quite bleak, really. Yes. Yeah. Very, very bleak. So all the more reason why it would be really extraordinary for someone to come in and say, “We’ll help you,” even at the point when you really didn’t care. But there must have been something there or some reason to live or some desire for your life to be better than it was that made decide, “Okay, I’ll submit myself to whatever this is.” It’s got to be better than what you were experiencing at the time, I would imagine. Just thinking back on it now, I think the only thing really that sort of led me to finally go and get the help that they were offering was my mother. And it wasn’t through her sort of begging me to go or anything like that. Somehow after that meeting, I gradually became aware, finally, of the sheer misery that I must be putting her through and how dreadfully I’d treated her and what an awful son and an awful human being I was for basically living in her house. I wasn’t giving her any money towards bills. She was working. She was basically keeping a roof over my head when I was… I was roundabout a 30-year-old man at that point, and she’d come home, and she’d find me passed out drunk on the floor, and I think I gradually came to realize how badly I treated her, and I just thought, “Well, I don’t care what happens to my life, but she shouldn’t have to put up with this.” And I think that’s all that really finally broke through my skull, really, was realizing that I couldn’t do that to my mother anymore. And that was it. It wasn’t any sense of self preservation or anything. There’s something beautiful, though, about at least there was a selflessness on some level, to care about your mother, who had cared so much for you. So you went into this facility, whatever it was. Why don’t you talk to us about that? So I went in there thinking, “I don’t want any of your Jesus nonsense or your Bible rubbish,” and fortunately really but from my perspective then unfortunately, it was very, very much, as you’d imagine, focused on Jesus and focused on the Bible. It was kind of a rehab home, really. There were ten men living there, and it was a very structured day, and I wasn’t, obviously, used to structure. Most of the people in there had come from heroin or cocaine addiction. There were one or two others there that had come from a drink background. Almost everybody in there, the day that I arrived, there were ten of us in total. I think nine of them were from Scotland, and the Scottish accent is… It can be quite impenetrable when you’ve got two Scotsmen talking to each other, and their accent sort of… They kind of tone their accent down, I think, a little bit. When you’re from the far north of Scotland, they tone their accent down a little bit when they’re talking to somebody who isn’t from Scotland. Well, I was just withdrawing from the drink, so my brain was completely gone. I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t concentrate. And I was surrounded by all these men who were talking, and I couldn’t understand anything they were saying. The program there, the structure really was they would give us… You had a half hour meeting every morning, which was pray and reading the Bible and a very brief message, very brief word from the guy who was running the house, and then we would have a work program, which usually involved us going and… There was a church attached to the rehab. Or should I say the rehab was attached to a church. And it was quite a large church by the standards of South Wales, probably quite small compared to most American churches, but it was a fairly large building, and we used to go there every day, and we would be in charge of cleaning it, the maintenance. They had a little cafe and coffee shop there that we would be in charge of cleaning and running, and then we’d have to go home, and we’d have to sort of clean the house, and we’d have to do any repairs on the house and things like that, and then in the evening, there’d be another Bible study, another devotional. We had to go to church on Saturday night and on Sunday morning and on Sunday evening every weekend. So to my mind it was quite intense. It was a lot of this God stuff. And I stayed there, thinking, “I’ll just be here for a couple of weeks, and then I’m going,” and all of the people there, and all of the people that were involved, the staff, the different people that were coming in out of the home, they were just so gracious and so loving, and all of the people were at various stages in their walk. Some of them had been saved. Some of them, like me, had no real interest in it. And I continued to try to be… I wasn’t deliberately being extremely difficult then because I was off the drink and I had at least some sort of sense of propriety. I thought, “Well, these people are helping me. I can’t be rude to them all the time,” but I used to delight in asking them all the difficult questions that I could get my hands on, and as we were looking in the Bible, I thought, “Oh, well I’ll ask them about this bit where it says He hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Does that mean we’ve got no free will?” And all of the kind of typical questions that people will try and trip people up with the Bible. And they continued to be loving and gracious and kind, and they would try to answer my questions, and they would be helpful as they could, and for a long time, I kind of resisted, and I didn’t want to know. But there were a lot of books in the house that had been donated. It was quite an impressive library that they had that had been donated. Some very old books and some very expensive-looking books, and I gradually started tentatively looking at one or two of them, and I didn’t read a great deal when I was there, but I read just some bits and pieces offering some kind of basic apologetic argument. And for the first time, I started thinking, “There is a slight possibility that there might be a little bit of truth to some of this.” And that was the little crack in my armor. And that was all that happened for quite a long time, and I was there for almost four months, and I’ll never forget the day… Obviously, I’ll never forget the day that I was saved. Because we were in a church service which I had to go to, and it was a Saturday night meeting, and the gentleman who’d actually come to my house, Kenny. The one that had come to me, and I’d been extremely rude to him, he was preaching there. He was one of the preachers, and he was preaching on Matthew 11. “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” And I remember, at the end of the service… and I’d walked into the service with the same mindset: “There is a very slight possibility there might be a little bit of truth to some of this, but I still don’t want your Christian nonsense.” And I listened to everything he said, and at the end of the service, they said, “We’ll bow our heads to pray now,” and I put my head down to pray, and I can’t really describe… The best way I can describe what happened is it was almost as if somebody told me something that I’d never heard before, and I instantly believed them. All of a sudden, I knew that it was all true. And there was no sort of massive choir of angels. There was no enormous religious experience. There was no dramatic event going on in my head or anything like that. It was almost like somebody just flicked a little switch, and I knew in some way that I can’t possibly describe that, without doubt, it is all absolutely true. And I can’t describe the shock that went through me. I just thought, “How did I not believe this before?” And it just kind of… It was almost like a very, very small firework going off in my head, and I just knew. And at the same moment, I thought, “Jesus really did die for me, and I really do owe everything to Him, and He can release me from everything, and He will save me if repent and if I turn to Him,” and all this stuff just went through in a fraction of a second, and at that point, I was saved, and I think I was more surprised than anybody, although a lot of people were very surprised. Wow. So you had this sudden, kind of intuitive knowledge that it was all true. Like a switch. That’s so interesting. Like a sudden paradigm shift. It wasn’t as if you had this prolonged intellectual struggle. It was like you were introduced to the truth by the book or maybe something you read, that somehow infiltrated your mind and your heart, and then I guess, at some point, being exposed to what you were exposed to… You spoke about the possibility or the presence and the person of Jesus and who He was and that He could save you. In certain Christian terms, it’s called the gospel. There was something true about that for you. Can you… For those who really may not know what that realization was, or what the gospel is, could you explain that just briefly? Yes, absolutely. I mean I sort of heard, in plenty of meetings, whether in church meetings or meetings in the house, that everyone, every man, every woman, every child, is essentially sinful. Every one of us is a sinner. Every one of us is imperfect. Nobody, no matter how hard they try, can possibly live a perfect life, and yet God’s perfect law requires that of us. And yet at the same time, because He’s so loving and because He’s so just and merciful, He understands that we can’t live up to that. He understands that we can’t live up to that law. And rather than insisting that we do, rather than insisting that we pay the price for our sins, He sent Jesus Christ. He sent His only Son. God in the flesh came, and He died, and He sacrificed himself, and He allowed himself to absorb the full weight of my sin and the full punishment for my sin, and rather than me trying to earn my way into God’s good books, all that was required of me was to completely put my faith in Jesus Christ and the work that He did and the sacrifice that He made and to repent of my sins, to acknowledge my sin and acknowledge that I need him and I can’t earn my salvation and I can’t earn His love, and to just completely surrender myself to Him and give myself to Him and know that every sin that I have committed and every sin that I will commit has been paid for by His blood, just because I put my faith in Him. That must have been really, like you say, a relief of burden. Like the passage that was read that evening, that you give your burden over to Christ, and that He carries it for you. Yeah. And these really a beautiful thing. Once you surrendered to that reality and surrendered to the person of Jesus. I love what you said, that you were surprised just as much as everyone around you. I can’t imagine, really. I mean, you put your head down for a prayer, and there was obviously some willingness to participate in the prayer. Then, you raise your head really with a whole new world and a whole new worldview, it sounds like. Why don’t you describe what happened after that point? I was always slightly jealous, and I realize jealousy isn’t a very Christian thing to feel. But I have to confess, I’m occasionally when jealous when I hear of other’s people’s conversion experiences, the moments when other people sort of come to this knowledge, come to this understanding of Jesus and His grace, and some people have this very dramatic encounter with the Lord. They’ll have a… Very occasionally, I think some people will have a vision, or some people will have this enormous kind of physical feeling, or something huge will happen to them. To me, I was just kind of wandering about in a state almost of shock for a few days, and I wanted there to be some enormous transformation in my life, but the reality was, although I knew and I understood that I was saved, as the sort of shock gradually moved away, I hoped that I’d be a much, much better person straightaway, and of course, the sad reality is that it doesn’t always work like that. The one thing that definitely did happen right at that moment was, up until that point, I’d been in the rehab for a few months, I kind of knew that, although I hadn’t drunk anything for a few months, I knew that I still was at a stage where, if I left, it wouldn’t be long before I fell down the hole again. I knew that I was kind of drifting through on willpower. I knew that it was only because I was there, surrounded by support, surrounded by people who cared, surrounded by rules and structure, that I hadn’t drunk. And I knew that if I left I would. And I was kind of waiting for that to go away. And then, from that day until this, so 10 years ago this week, I have never, for even the slightest moment, had any inclination whatsoever to drink again, and I am constantly baffled that I ever wanted to. And I’m not judgmental towards people who do like a drink or even people who struggle with drink, but I’ll walk past a bar or something, and I’ll see people drinking, and it just seems an alien thing to me. I think, “Well, why did I want to do that?” And that was the biggest transformation that happened immediately. But then, sort of gradually, I came to realize that I didn’t want to leave the rehab yet because I was surrounded by all these people who suddenly were my brothers in Christ. And I was going to a church with all these people who were essentially like my family, my adoptive family, you know? And gradually I began to change. And gradually I became very sorrowful about the dreadful person that I’d been and, at the same time, thankful to Jesus that He was beginning to change me, and it was at this point that I realized that I’d spent all my life thinking I was very clever and then, all of a sudden, I realized that I wasn’t, which I think was His way of kindly showing me, “You’ve got no place being arrogant and looking down on people.” Yes, and then I stayed in the rehab then for… I stayed on for quite some time, and I eventually became staff there, and I volunteered as a staff member, and I lived in the home, and I helped with new people coming in and mentoring people, and I also was then involved with the worship at the church, so I then used to lead worship. I played guitar and sang, and I became very active in the church, actually. I was helping with discipleship. I was helping out with the youth groups. I was still going up every day and cleaning and doing maintenance and things like that, and all of a sudden, this whole new world opened up to me, and instead of being in this rehab, desperately hoping that I wouldn’t start drinking again, all of a sudden it wasn’t a rehab to me. It was home to me, and the church became my life, and my fellow Christians became my life, and I wanted to do things to help, and I wanted to sort of pour myself into the church community, really, so it was a pretty dramatic change gradually. Yes, it sounds amazing, and I first want to say congratulations on your sobriety, but I totally appreciate the fact here that you’re really… What I hear you saying is that this is part of the transformation that God made in your heart, this sudden disinclination to drink. That’s just an amazing, amazing thing, that you lost the desire totally. Absolutely. When I tell people that I used to be an alcoholic and I was terrible, a really, really awful alcoholic. Like I said earlier, I would lose weeks at a time. Weeks at a time would just disappear, and I wouldn’t have the faintest idea, and sometimes I’d wake up in the street at 3:00 in the morning, sleeping behind a bin or something. I had no idea where I’d been. I’d wake up with bruises. I think I used to get into fights and things I don’t remember. And I would tell people about these things, and they’d say, “Oh, that’s wonderful! Well done, you,” and I always try and explain to them it’s nothing to do with me, and I try not to come across with this sort of false modesty and things, but I say it’s genuinely nothing to do with me. It would be almost like congratulating me for having the blood clot on my brain removed, and I’d have to go, “Look, I didn’t do anything. They just gave me anesthetic, and the surgeon took it.” You can’t congratulate me on getting rid of my blood clot, and in the same way, I don’t want people to congratulate me for being sober for a little over 10 years now. Jesus Christ took out… As it says in the Bible, “I will take out your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” He took out those dreadful things in me, and He put better things in me, and the ways that I’ve hopefully changed now and become something of a better person, and I definitely have my flaws and my faults, but the good things about me now are entirely because of Jesus and the change that He’s worked in my life, and the bad things about me now are just the things that I’m foolishly hanging on to and I need to get rid of. So yes, I’ve changed so much that I definitely don’t want to drink again, but it’s entirely Jesus that’s done it. Wow. That’s really amazing and an amazing testimony, really, of the power of Christ in someone’s life once they surrender. And surrender’s a very, very difficult thing, but your putting hands in the One who wants what’s best for you and that you can find an abundant life, it sounds like you have found. And I do have a question: When you came to a place of surrender, you said that you had come also to a place of understanding a bit of a knowledge of God and who Christ was and what He did and that you accepted that, and you moved into where church is your adopted family, which, again, is a beautiful picture of what the church should be. But I’m curious, though, in terms of… What about? Remember when you were an atheist, and you were raising all those difficult questions and hard places in scripture, and what about this and what about that? What about all those things, those intellectual issues that you once raised? As a Christian who was coming to know more about God and about Christ and the Bible and someone who’s naturally clever, I would say, again by the grace of God, you have probably a very decent intellect, and I’m sure you’re a curious person and want to resolve some of those issues that are often posed against Christianity. In the last ten years, have you addressed some of those issues? Have you taken an intellectual kind of path in your faith as well? Yes. I’ve definitely tried to. I find, as time goes by, I’m more and more interested. I think initially I kind of had to tuck those questions away, and I hated the idea of switching my brain off. I didn’t necessarily just decide that I wasn’t going to try and answer those, but initially, I just kind of thought… I realized in some strange way, on some level, that Jesus had a lot of work to do in me, and I kind of saw him doing it gradually, so I tucked those things away for some time. Some of the difficult questions, then, I started to resolve just by reading the Bible more. And then, as time went by then, I became more and more interested in them, and I’ve almost erred more towards the intellectual side of reading around Christianity, I think, because that’s kind of how God wired me, and then I became fairly interested in apologetics some years ago, and I started buying more books, and I started attending seminars and conferences and things like that, and all of a sudden, now, I’ve got several hundred books that I desperately want to read that I think would resolve a lot of questions, but I also have two small children, so I find that, as my desire for more understanding and more knowledge grows, the amount of time that I have has shrunk rapidly, but what I am hoping is that, as time goes by, I will be able to sort of do more reading and more studying things. But I did start… I think I mentioned to you previously. I started my own apologetics organization, and I’m by no means particularly knowledgeable about apologetics, but my interest was I want to try and find answers, and I think other people want answers as well, so let’s look at them together. So I wanted to sort of aim for that kind of aspect of Christianity, because I know very well that there are answers out there, and I think that there are answers that… Christianity hasn’t just popped up. It’s been around for 2,000 years. I would be foolish to think that I was the first person that had these questions, so yes, I have erred towards the sort of more intellectual side, and some of the questions I’ve answered, but a lot of them are still to be answered, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m just looking forward to finding the answers really. First of all, I want to affirm that I love that you’ve started some kind of an apologetics organization and your posture towards it, that we’re learning together. I think that’s an amazing reflection of your humility but also your intellectual curiosity and your openness to go wherever the evidence leads, which is where we should all be. I do wonder. I can hear the skeptic scratching his head. Going back earlier in your conversation, where you were drawn towards atheism because you wanted it to be true, in a sense, and so you were looking towards that and looking for things that affirmed that and statements and things. I can just hear, in the back of my head, a skeptic saying, “Well, you just want Christianity to be true, and so you’re going to look for answers that confirm your perspective.” How would you speak to someone who raised that objection? Probably in a few ways, really. To begin with, I desperately wanted Christianity to not be true, right up to the moment when I suddenly realized it was. And it’s difficult to intellectualize what I suppose we’d call a religious experience, whatever that religious experience might be, whether it’s extremely dramatic or whether it’s quite understated, as mine was. So I had that moment, I had that experience, and I knew it was true, and you know, all of the epistemologists out there will be sort of ready to pounce on me or disregard that, I suppose. And yet I desperately wanted atheism to be true, so I decided that it was and didn’t really do a great deal of investigation into it either way, whereas with Christianity, I didn’t want it to be true, and I suddenly realized that it was in a way that I can’t put into words how certain I am. There must have been something. Something outside of me put that into me because I wasn’t looking for it, and I didn’t want it, and it suddenly popped up with a conviction that I couldn’t possibly overturn. And since then, I have investigated it, and I have looked at the questions, and I have sort of thought about some of the evidence, and I have thought about things like the historicity of the resurrection, the reliability of the Bible, the transmission of Bible documents, some of the philosophical arguments regarding… the argument for moral knowledge and cosmological arguments and all this kind of thing. And it’s very difficult to deny that there is something about Christianity that has withstood the intellectual assault of 2000 years and has stood extremely strongly, and there are aspects of Christianity that are accepted even by the most hostile opponents, really. You get… People like Bart Ehrman will defend to the hilt the fact that somebody called Jesus really walked around the earth. He’ll defend the transmission of the Bible documents to some extent. And atheist philosophers of religion will say theism is an intellectually credible position if you really look at the arguments. Now, they won’t accept those arguments, but even people who are extremely intelligent, extremely well read, and extremely knowledgeable about all of the facts will say there is some nugget of possible truth that they don’t accept themselves. So all that’s just kind of a roundabout way of saying I didn’t want Christianity to be true, and now that I’ve looked at it after having my experience, I can say, if you look at the evidence it is genuinely overwhelming. And if anybody is listening and they have considered the possibility of looking at the evidence, start with the evidence for the resurrection and the historicity of Jesus and go from there. Because it’s genuinely just enormously overwhelming. That’s good advice, especially for someone who might actually be open enough to consider looking at what is out there to be seen and to be read and to be considered. Is there anything else that you would like to advise perhaps someone who might be listening who is a curious skeptic? Who might be open to consider or think about the things of God? I think one of the most popular ways to attack Christianity in general is to point out the ways that Christians have failed and then use that to try and undermine the truths of Christianity, whereby the Bible is very clear, and any thinking Christian will be very up front about saying, “We are all fallible. We are all sinful. We all make mistakes,” so you can’t judge Christianity by the actions of Christians because we make a lot of mistakes, and goodness knows I make enough mistakes, but just look at Christ and don’t, for now, worry about Christians. And obviously that’s not saying that Christians should have license to act however they want. We should be held to a higher standard. But yeah. Focus on Christ, rather than on us. I think that’s great advice. And to those Christians who are listening who, probably very compelled by your story, especially by those who entered into your life, Kenny and Faye. And the example that they provided. And those in the rehab, just continually loving, kind, patient, serving you, just listening and waiting in the face of your, I guess, lack of gracious response. I’m very impressed by that. How would you advice Christians best to engage with those who are resistant or not interested or not willing, kind of like what you were? First of all, I think probably one of the most important rules of any kind of personal evangelism or anything like that is to treat every individual as an individual, because I think it can be very easy to get into a conversation with a nonbeliever, whether they’re hostile or open or neutral to the whole idea of Christianity, it’s so easy to approach the conversation with a kind of preconceived idea of, “Well, you know, you’re an atheist, so you believe in Darwinian evolution and you believe that science has all of the answers to everything and you believe that Jesus was a myth,” and I think that your preconceptions can distort the way that you have a conversation with them. But they’re all individuals, and whether they’re hostile or open, they have a reason for that. I remember I went to an apologetics training weekend, and I went there still a little bit full of myself, thinking, “Yeah, I’ll learn all these apologetics arguments, and I’ll be able to convince somebody into Christianity,” and I was still thinking that way then. And the first session that we actually had, the lecturer stood up, and he said, “If you’ve come here thinking that you’re going to learn five irrefutable logical arguments for Christianity and you’ll be some kind of apologetics ninja and you’ll convince somebody into Christianity,” he said, “you’re starting with the wrong mindset. We’re about talking to people, and we’re about engaging with people, and you can’t treat a person as an argument.” Sorry, I got rather long-winded then, but yes, in a nutshell, just approach them as an individual and a person and ask them why they believe or don’t believe whatever it is they believe or disbelieve, and think properly and deeply about their reasons for it. Well, Craig, I do appreciate your story, your transparency. You have lived a beautiful and tragic life, or a tragic and a beautiful life. However that works and whatever it is, in whatever form, I’m sure you’re very grateful for everything that’s happened in your life because it has brought you to the person that you are now, to the faith that you have now, and the purposes you have now, and obviously, you have a beautiful family- I do, yes. … and a lot… Just a dramatic transformation in your life. Just so much to celebrate! Yes, absolutely. And we’re privileged to be a part of listening to your story, so thank you for coming on today- It’s really my pleasure. … and sharing it all. Yeah. And I hope that… What is the name of your apologetics organization and contact, so that, if people are interested in more about what that is, could you tell us a little bit about that? Yes. It’s 136 Apologetics. I wanted to sort of always be aware that evangelism and apologetics really have to be driven by Jesus, so it’s named after 1 Corinthians 3:6, where Paul wrote, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase,” so yes, 136 Apologetics. My main personal interest is outreach to Jehovah’s Witnesses, which a whole different story again, but that’s what I tend to personally focus on a lot, but we do organize seminars and things that like for general apologetics as well. You can find us on Facebook. We’re on Twitter. We’re on YouTube. And we’re hoping, obviously, to, once COVID is all over and all of the lock downs stop and everything, we’re hoping to have a lot more general training and outreach to people and just learning more and more about all the difficult questions together. And yeah. And hopefully taking the gospel to the world. That’s terrific. I’ll include information about your organization in the episode notes for anybody, again, who wants to learn more about it or perhaps reach out to you. Thank you. Thanks again, Craig, for coming onboard, and we are just leaving encouraged by your story. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast today to hear Craig’s story. You can find out more about 136 Apologetics and how to connect with Craig 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, I hope you’ll subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how someone else flips the record of their life.

Former skeptic Julie Hannah takes an intellectual, scientific journey to discover answers to life’s biggest questions and finds Christ. Julie’s autobiographical book, A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus (2020), is available on Amazon and Kindle Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who once did not believe in God but who, against all odds, became a Christian. Today, we’ll be talking with Julie Hanna. She was once a skeptical agnostic with a passionate interest in the human condition who spent many years exploring a very fundamental question: Do our lives have any meaning? Or are they just random events that end with death? She searched for answers in a wide range of sciences, philosophies, and faiths and was prepared to reach any reasonable conclusion from the evidence. No philosophy or faith system seemed ultimately convincing, at least at first. Her desire to ignore Christianity as implausible was challenged in her attempt to disprove it, but she ultimately became convinced by it. She has written about her journey towards Christianity in her book entitled A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus, where she methodically looks at the facts regarding science, the biblical texts, the historical person of Jesus, the issue of suffering, and many others. I hope you’ll come and listen to her story today, as she tells how she moved from agnostic skepticism to ardent Christian. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Julie. It’s great to have you. Thanks so much, Jana, for the opportunity to share my thoughts with your listeners. Thank you. We’re so glad to have you on today. As we’re getting started, so the listeners know a little bit about you, can you tell us a bit about yourself? I live in South Africa, in Johannesburg, although I was born in Zambia, but I’ve lived here most of my adult life, and I’m a mathematics lecturer. That’s what I’ve done all of my life, really, is taught at high schools and then at university, so I have a passion for mathematics and The Bush. I have a passion for the African Bush. And I’m a mother of two grown-up boys, and I’m recently retired, so I had time to put down my thoughts and actually get my thoughts published, which is part of what our discussion is about. Yes. So tell me about your book? What is the name of it? And where can it be found? It’s called A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus, because that’s literally what it was. It was my exploration as an agnostic, almost atheist skeptic, and it is available on Amazon. It’s published by Wipf and Stock. That’s good, and I will include that information also in the episode notes of the podcast for anybody who wants to look into that. So as we’re getting started with your story, I love what you say about that you love the African Bush. I had a brief experience in The Bush about three years ago. It was the most amazing place I think I have ever seen, to be honest. Really one of the highlights of my life. I presume that you have — when you say you grew up in Zambia and you have a love for the African Bush, what does that look like growing up in that area of the world. And we never saw wild animals there, apart from baboon, but it was a very natural way. We never wore shoes unless we went to school, and it was a very free and kind of open to exploration. That’s what we loved. It was a very privileged upbringing. Well, that sounds pretty wonderful, really idyllic for any child to have that sense of freedom and exploration. I can’t imagine. That really sounds wonderful. What was the religious climate in that area? I know probably in South Africa, from my very, very limited experience, there are all kinds of thoughts about religion and God. Why don’t you tell us about that? Yeah. I had minimal religious influence in my upbringing. None of my family or friends were religious. We were nominally Anglican, so we went to Sunday school because that’s just what good parents were supposed to do with their children, but my mother admitted she didn’t believe in God, and yeah, there was really — I can’t speak for Zambia for a whole or even South Africa as a whole, but by the time I was a teenager, I rejected belief in God and the afterlife, based, unfortunately, on really minimal exposure to Christian thinking. So the nominal experience that you did have as a child — did you have any even basic childlike believe in God? Did you ever pray? Or was it just going through the motions of an Anglican service or that sort of thing? Yeah. There was never really a sense that it was anything more than a societal thing that people did. And really, as I say, as a teenager, I decided that Christians probably didn’t think much about their beliefs. Based on really nothing more than a few Sunday school lessons and being bored in church, which also fell away by the time I was about 12. I think we stopped even going to those ceremonies. But it seemed to me, I’d have to say almost from the outside of Christianity, that it seemed to be a narrow and simplistic worldview, and looking back, I seem to have judged what Christianity was in the same that you would judge the culture of a country from someone’s holiday photographs. Yes. Because I knew almost nothing. I’d never read any scripture. Never read anything myself. I just knew vague stories about floods and arks and people walking on water, and none of it jelled with me. Because it had never been really presented to me as an adult. I only had a child’s exposure, which I actually am starting to think is not an unusual case. Some of the atheistic people I’ve been speaking to since my conversion are very proud that they rejected Christianity when they were young, as if that’s something to be proud of. But when I look back, it’s something to be embarrassed about. Because I hadn’t explored it as an adult, which is a huge weakness, of course. So it was really arrogant of me to be so confidently atheistic on the basis of such little knowledge. So as a teenager, you started in some ways to reject this childlike understanding, I suppose, of Christianity, thinking that it was just merely a social construction perhaps. Maybe a social cultural activity. Correct. And it was based on some rather strange myths of miraculous things. So it seemed to be an obvious thing to reject it, which I did at the time. There was just no credibility. No real substance to it. And so obviously you were intellectual and interested in academics, so you were moving in . . . as a teenager I presume . . . . How old were you when you really took on that label of atheist? Was that something that you strongly identified with? Or it was just that you knew you didn’t believe in God? I’d say by the time I was about 17, 18, and I was reading French existentialism, and I thought, “Now, here is a brave and courageous, thoughtful way of looking at a meaningless world.” I think at about that stage, I thought, “Okay, that’s it. I’m not going the God route. This makes more sense, so let’s just put that all aside.” This brave, courageous way of looking at the world through an existentialist worldview, it is, in a sense, a very brave way to look at life if you look at it through to its logical ends in existentialism. Did you go that far in viewing your worldview? That essentially you were brave if you were able to face the world starkly with regard to loss of meaning and those kinds of things? I thought that I had to critique that as well because, although I wasn’t religious, I was very interested in the human condition and in questions like, “What does it mean to be human?” as opposed to just a cat or a dog. “Does our life have significance?” “Is there a correct worldview?” “Is there a particular way we should be living?” So although existentialism suggested that we must make our own moral decisions and there’s nothing transcendent to that, I wanted to critique that as well. I wanted to read more broadly about what possibilities there might be. So I actually started an investigation that would stretch over the next few decades, and it was in two main directions: One direction was into science, and in particular what the new physics had to say about the universe, and the other direction was an exploration into various belief systems. So how did that play out? Did you start this active investigation as an 18-year-old or in university or just beyond? You said it took a few years, actually, to do this, so what did that look like? It was probably in my mid twenties that it started becoming less of an “I should do this” and more of an “I’m going to do this.” So then I was sidetracked by having children, so towards my late twenties, it really started in earnest, where I started a sort of twenty- or thirty-year investigation. So you were in your mid twenties. I’m really impressed—first of all, I must say—that you were thoughtful enough about your own existence and your own worldview that you wanted to think about it more deeply. Because oftentimes, it’s just too easy to avoid. But you were obviously an introspective, again thoughtful person about your life, and you wanted to understand it. So you said you started in two directions, one through science and one into various worldviews. So can you talk with us perhaps about one of those? Did you go down the scientific road first? Or did you go towards more of the humanities and religions? They were almost in parallel, and I thought I’d share a few results from science first that strongly influenced my thinking. Yes, yes. Okay. The first resulted from cosmology. As Brian Greene admits, the physicist, there’s still a continuing ignorance on the fundamental origin of the universe. That interested me, that science has not been able to account for the arising of the universe. We simply don’t know how it came about. And this issue of the physical constraints that happened—there were physical constants that have to be constrained within extremely narrow margins for carbon-based life to develop. It’s the very well-known fine-tuning argument. The fact is that our universe is phenomenally improbable. That is something that has been arguable. The only way to account for the statistic of improbability is to suggest that perhaps there’s an infinite number of universes, so that this particular one at least becomes possible to have arrived, but there are major flaws and problems with this hypothesis, and there are quite a few scientists who speak very strongly against the suggestion that there must be an infinite number of universes. So that was important to me. I don’t think I’ll go into the critiques of that theory at the moment because of time. I guess you were coming to a conclusion, it sounds like, that there had to be some kind of transcendent source outside of the universe in order for the universe to have been caused in the beginning and that we live in kind of a Goldilocks universe that requires some kind of powerful or infinite kind of source in order for this fine tuning to be as it is. So were you coming to those conclusions that perhaps there had to be this kind of transcendent source beyond the universe in order for these things to be a reality as we see them? Yes. I was agreeing with people like the scientist Paul Davies, who says the impression of design is overwhelming. He’s not a theist, but full stop, the impression of design is overwhelming. There’s no getting around it. And cosmologist Allan Sandage, who became a Christian, largely because of this evidence of design. So, although I didn’t immediately join them, as it were, it did open my eyes to the strong possibility that there might well be a transcendent designer. That was a very interesting finding for me, yes. So then, from that perspective, I guess then, it would be more interesting or I could see where you would be driven towards, okay, if there is a designer for this design, an originator for the origin of the universe, that perhaps then maybe religion . . . or there may be a god who is causing this, so I would imagine, then, your approach towards the human condition and how religion answered those questions would be a little bit more diligent, with the understanding that perhaps there really is a god, or gods at that point, who could exist. Yeah. Absolutely. It opened my eyes to the possibility that it was worth exploring in a way. If I’d gone into physics and then said, “Well, we know how it all happened. It’s A, B, C. There’s no need to go beyond our naturalist interpretations and our physical laws of phenomenon.” If I’d encountered that, that would probably have been the end of the story for me. So this was a big thing, saying it’s worth delving deeper. Plus the fact that we don’t even know what matter is. I found that intriguing. That the things that look like ordinary physical objects are really just probability waves and waves of potentiality, rather than objects, and that probably our four-dimensional spacetime is undoubtedly embedded in a higher dimensional reality. That was very important for me. Because how could we know how a higher dimensional being could interact with our limited spacetime continuum, and I found that very challenging. So it wasn’t simple enough to say we can have a naturalist, determinist, materialist view of the world. Scientists were saying, “No, you can’t.” Our reality is far more complex than it might seem to us. There had to be a hypothesis, as it were, that there had to be something outside the natural world in order for what we know and experience within the natural world. Yeah. The higher dimensional idea points to something transcendent. And the fact that nature itself behaves in such counterintiuitive ways and that it’s not good enough simply to say, for example, there’s stuff, and there’s human consciousness, even, which seems to be quite an easy way to see the world. “There’s a chair, there’s a table, there’s me, and then there’s my consciousness as something separate.” The new physics is countering that. The new physics says no, that the unfolding of reality is impacted upon directly by human consciousness. That’s in essence what quantum mechanics is saying. So again I thought, “Well, if we don’t really understand the nature of material substance itself and how our consciousness might be impacting on it and affecting it, and there are higher dimensions, what about a higher dimensional consciousness, then? How might that be impacting on our reality?” So there were so many ways in which science was saying, “You’ve got to think beyond what you think you understand.” So your eyes were really being opened to possibilities, and you were pursuing this information and knowledge. . . I guess in a sense it sounds like with some degree of openness and willingness to go wherever the evidence led. Tell me more about . . . so science was kind of opening the door for you to possibilities. Tell me about your exploration into worldviews, then, and religions, towards the human condition. Right. So at this stage, I was really only feeling that we should be at least humble enough to accept the possibility of some guiding form of transcendent intelligence in the universe. That’s the point to which science took me. But I was still thinking this transcendent principle could be completely impersonal. So, in my explorations, I was looking at the natural order of Dao and Daoism or the absolute reality of Brahman or some form of cosmic energy in Kashmir Shaivism, where energy becomes manifest, which is very close to what physics is saying, that matter is a form of energy, and I was reading also about Jewish Kabbalah and the Hindu scriptures, the Hare Krishna movement, various forms of Buddhism, but none of those, although they sort of hinted at truths and they were quite exciting, especially where they did fit in with the new physics, nothing made me feel, “Oh, this is the path,” or, “Here is an explanation about the human condition and our purpose and the nature of the universe,” and so on. They were all just very interesting, rather than anything I felt I could commit to. Then, something very interesting happened which really took me in a completely unexpected direction, and that is that I kept encountering references to the cosmic Christ in non-Christian places, like the Guru Paramahansa Yogananda, for example, and that’s when I thought, “Oh, here comes this Christ story again.” Yes. Yes. I thought, “Oh, I thought I’d gotten rid of this.” I mean, in my head, anything to do with a miracle with a God man must be nonsense. I did not want to get involved with Christianity, but as you say, it’s always been important for me to base opinion on evidence. So I felt if I was to be objective I’d have to investigate Christian scripture, even if it was just so that I could explain why I rejected it. Because when I thought to myself, “Why am I against this Christ idea? Why am I against anything to do with Christianity? What is my basis? What is my evidence?” I realized I actually had no basis because I’d only encountered it as a child. So I decided, “Okay, here is my aim. I’m going to discredit Christianity.” So what did you find as you started into the investigation of Christianity? Yeah. Needless to say, it was a total surprise. It was a total surprise. I expected that I would hear some sophistic moral teachings and some bizarre miracle stories, and instead I was struck by this consistent voice of authority and authenticity in the gospels. This consistent voice that I just could not ignore. I was interested much later to learn that, although Albert Einstein rejected the Judeo-Christian God absolutely, he did say this in an interview, and I’d love to quote him here if I may. I’m sure a lot of people have heard this, but when I read it, it gelled with me. I thought, “Oh, yes! This is the way I felt when I first read the gospels.” Einstein said this in his interview: “No one can read the gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.” Quite powerful words. Yes. Yeah. And that is how I felt. As I read it, I thought, “But this is not a Robin Hood exaggerated legend kind of figure I’m encountering here. This is a consistent voice of authority.” I just couldn’t believe that a range of writers could have fabricated Jesus’s teachings and His distinct personality with the consistency that I was encountering, and that’s when I thought, “Uh oh. I think I’d better investigate this a bit deeper before I just toss it aside as a superficial response.” So I started a specific and deliberate investigation into Christianity and its roots in Judaism. So what did that deliberate investigation look like? Well, first I read and re-read the New Testament, because I wanted to see how all the pieces of these different stories fit together to try to make a whole out of all these puzzle pieces. So I read it and re-read it and Paul’s letters and John’s revelation and so on, to get a sense of what the central message was. And then I read the Old Testament. Then I researched Rabbinic texts about the Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. I read theological commentaries. My favorite was Karl Barth. I read scholarly papers on the resurrection and church and the transmission of scripture in those times, oral and written, especially in the early Jewish communities, and I read atheist critiques of all of these aspects. I was trying to still keep an open mind. I mean I was probably even keen, at that stage, to find out that Jesus’s followers had exaggerated His nature and His worth. But although I was happy to find many contradictions and flaws and arguments against the veracity and the authenticity of the gospels, I discovered something completely different. I discovered that there are links and consistencies between the Old and New Testaments that are truly astounding, and Jesus’s work not only fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. They also provide—together with His promised return, they provide a physical enactment of the seven feasts of Judaism. There’s a whole structural parallel. The datings, the symbolism, they’re remarkable. If Jesus did or said the bulk of what you read about in the New Testament, then those writers would have had to invent a whole amazing realm of detail about His fact, his claims, his teachings, death, resurrection, to tie in very closely with numerous ancient images and prophecies and festivals and dates and rituals. It’s just impossible for that all to have been invented. So it was the consistency and the parallels and the tie in with the whole of the Old Testament traditions and prophecies that made me decide nobody could have just come up and invented all of the stuff that we find about Jesus in the New Testament. Yes, it is quite amazing when you sit back and look at the whole of the narrative from Old Testament to New Testament, considering it was written over a process of 1400 years, around 40 authors, several continents, and then you look at the cohesiveness of the narrative, and that alone is just incredibly astounding, much less what you talk about in terms of just the integration of the story, the prophecies, the fulfillments, the symbolism, and how it all points to the person of Christ and His being really the center of all history. It really is overwhelming when you start to step back and look how all the—as you said before—how all the puzzle pieces start to be placed together into some kind of coherent whole. And I wonder, since you had a concern about the human condition and really looking into that, of course you were coming to an intellectual understanding of how all of these things came together and the ring of truth and the person of Christ. I also wonder how it answered those questions for you about the human condition, who we are, how we determine right and wrong, where does our sense of consciousness and even dignity and value or purpose play as you were reading and putting together these pieces with regard to Christianity and the person of Christ. In terms of the meaning, the human meaning? Yes. Who we are in our humanness and in our brokenness. Our beauty and our brokenness and how that relates to scripture and those very deep questions you were searching for with regard to the human condition. Yeah. I think, strangely enough, it was a deep question, and Christ has provided a deep answer, and for me, I can only give what might seem almost shallow in its simplicity, but it just brought me peace. From the Old Testament through to Revelation, from the broken promises in the Garden of Eden and then the promises of God throughout the Old Testament: “I will provide a new creation.” “I will provide atonement.” “I will wipe away all tears.” And then Christ coming and saying, “I’m here to complete the Father’s work. My meat is to do the work of the Father,” until He said, on the cross, “It is done.” “Tetelestai.” “It is finished.” Through to John’s Revelation where there is a new heaven and earth and there is restoration with Christ and all tears are wiped away and we have access to the tree of life, that huge beginning-to-end vast cosmic picture just gave me one very simplistic response, “Yay!” Well, yeah! It’s all planned.” God has it all from beginning to end, even through our suffering and our problems. We just have to rest. “I have brought you rest,” was the final sense of how I responded to my investigation. That’s amazing! It seems to me that this cosmic Christ, who is the One, like you say, over all, in control of all in this extraordinary cosmic way is also incredibly very personal. It sounds like what He brings, not only overall cosmos, He also brings into your life this sense of movement from chaos to shalom. You keep speaking of rest and peace, and that was your response. And that’s really a beautiful kind of response because you can see how the pieces are placed together, and there must be some kind of rest in that, to have these grand questions answered in a way that you were intently seeking. Very much so. In terms of that resting, I’ve just remembered something that happened to me which I’d like to share? Yes, yes, certainly. I was busy with studying Sufism at the time, and it’s an esoteric aspect within Islam. It’s a truly beautiful spiritual path in terms of trying to perfect yourself and to work on your forgiveness and your grace, and I was working very hard at that. I did tend to judge other people, and I was wrestling with myself. I was trying to force myself through meditation and so on. I was trying to force myself into a state of loving patience, which is very important in Sufism. And I was aspiring to this goal. I was focusing. I was meditating. And then one day my neighbor’s kids drove me nuts, really nuts. Because they had regular long screaming matches, so I stormed outside, and I had a confrontation with the caretaker, and I came back in my house and I . . . Really. I threw up my hands, and I said aloud, “I give up! I’m done with all of this! I cannot do it!” And then a quiet voice in my mind, but I promise it was not my thought. A quiet voice just said, “Of course you can’t.” Yes. Of course. “Of course you can’t.” I was trying to perfect myself, make myself some kind of superhuman, wonderfully blissful, kind, gracious, calm person, and I was trying to master my emotions. I was trying to force myself to be what I wasn’t, which is quite an explosive personality, and this voice just said, “Of course you can’t.” I can’t tell you what relief I felt! I felt as though I’d been trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Or as if I was traveling in a train and I’d been carrying a huge burden, and someone just said, “Why don’t you put that down? The train will take you.” I laughed. I cannot tell you the sense of relief I felt. There was such a pressure and a burden that just left me. I felt light. I felt liberated. I felt set free. And for some reason I thought, “I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to do it. There’s nothing I have to do. I can just rest, and it’s going to be okay.” Now at that stage I was still into many, many other . . . I hadn’t even started exploring Christianity, so I didn’t even know what this peace was about or where it was going to lead me or where it would come from or what it meant, but I’ll never forget that sense of, “It’s not my fight. I don’t have to wrestle. I can rest!” And I cannot help feeling that, in those early days, the Holy Spirit was somehow trying to tell me, “Don’t worry.” Yes. I would imagine so. There really is something so relieving when you come to the realization that it really isn’t all about you. And what you can do. It’s about what Christ has already done for you on the cross. I imagine, when you reading through the New Testament then after that, when you came to Jesus’s words, where he says, “Those of you who are heavily ladened or burdened, come to Me, and I will give you rest,” that must have resonated when you ran across that passage. It absolutely did. I thought, “This is what I sensed a long time ago, without even realizing what the source was.” So all of the pieces then came together, and you came to a place obviously of belief that it made sense, not only of the cosmos but of the world and made sense of your world in a sense. It did absolutely. When I realized that, if people had created or invented, fabricated, all of these details that I’m speaking about that fit in, it would have been a spectacularly, impossibly well-structured exaggeration”Go away and make up some stories and talk about him amongst yourselves.” It would be impossible for that to happen in such a coherent way, for such a voice to come through, and then, as you said, for it to all fit in with the Old Testament. Or it would have been a sophisticated and uniquely brilliant fraud, but why would people do that? Why would they go back . . . because people often say, “Well, it’s easy for the guys who wrote the New Testament to copy stuff from the Old Testament and to make it look as though there’s a connection,” but why would they even do that? There’s no motivation to make up a whole lot of details, and of course, they couldn’t have created all of the details around Jesus dying on Passover and rising on the day of Firstfruits Festival and so on. But there would be no reason for them to do it. There wasn’t even an expectation that the Messiah would die and rise, so why would they create that strange thing? So yeah, it was the way everything fitted in together, and then, as you say, the sense that, “Okay. Although we might rail against it, this idea of the original fall and rebellion and God’s long-term plan does make sense in terms of our world experience. Why are we suffering like this? What does it mean? Does it mean that life is completely meaningless? Should we just give up and look to our own humanist selves for our morals and our ethos and our ethics? It did, as we say, answer the questions about how do we live life and what is the purpose of life. Nothing, no other belief system, had answered those questions with such clarity and intellectual satisfaction. So you know I constantly hear this sense that there is a presumption about who Jesus is, what the Bible is, what Christianity is, who Christians are, and somehow, when someone actually gets close enough—perhaps not to some Christians, I guess—but they see something so totally other than what they expected. And you used the word surprised earlier. It was a total surprise. I would imagine that, in a way, you’re still somewhat surprised, as someone who was seeking to disprove Christianity, now to find yourself now a strong advocate for it. What I thought once I got to this point was, “I would like to have known this stuff when I was asking questions decades ago.” I would have liked to have found a book that said, “Look at these connections. The stuff you can’t make up. And look at the coherence of the whole picture, from Genesis through to Revelation. Who would have made all of that up? And look at science. has science answered all the big questions? Or are they also still seeking?” These are the things that weren’t easily accessible to me in my search, so then I thought, “Well, I’d like people to know this, because I think it’s useful stuff. Whatever they decided, I would like people to have this interesting information to work from.” So that’s what drove you write. So that others could have what you didn’t? Yes. That’s really wonderful. So considering you as a former skeptic, if you were to speak to those who are currently skeptics, or perhaps listening, even interested and looking into Christianity, what would you advise them in terms of a search? Well, firstly, I’d like to encourage an open-minded approach because reality is so much more complex and mysterious than it appears to us, and there are some very good science books written about this that are accessible. Paul Davies particularly writes very accessible science that opens one’s mind. And I would also encourage people who are either seeking or not believing to be very skeptical when they hear confident assertions that natural processes have explained everything about how the universe arose and how intelligent life developed on earth, because that’s simply not true. There are highly respected scientists that are saying exactly the opposite, and many are concluding that an intelligent creator makes more logical sense from scientific evidence than simply random development. So you often hear people out there saying, “Oh, yeah, but they’ve created life in the laboratory. They know how the universe arose from quantum fluctuations,” and so on. Those are simplistic statements that are not supported by the science. And Marcos Eberlin . . . he’s an award-winning chemist. He published in just 2019? He summarized a whole lot of scientific findings regarding the development of life on earth, and his book is endorsed by Nobel prize winners, and this is the title of his book, because it says everything—his book is called Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. That’s a Nobel winning—well, he didn’t win the Nobel prize, but the guys who endorsed his book did, and he says there is definite evidence of foresight. So don’t be cut off or overwhelmed or convinced by superficial statements out there that science has explained it all, because that’s just not true. So, Julie, for those Christians who are listening who want to engage more thoughtfully not only with their own worldview but also engaging, helping others to see that perhaps Christianity isn’t as simplistic as they think it is, how would you encourage Christians to engage with those who are skeptical? Yeah. I think it’s really important for Christians to be well informed because there’s so much vociferous and intense attack almost on Christian belief, that it has to be anti-rationalist, that it’s in conflict with science, that it is simplistic and narrow and stupid. There’s so much of that out there, and increasingly so with the proponents of new atheism, that I think Christians could only benefit from knowing what science says, which is not in conflict with scripture, to my way of thinking, anyway. I’m not talking about necessarily the six-day argument that becomes quite complicated in itself, but just the overall sense of a Creator God who’s in control, He sent His Son, the work that Jesus has done. There’s nothing here that conflicts with science, and there are so many scientists who have been brought to Christ through their scientific work, brought to faith, brought to belief in God, and I think Christians can only benefit from knowing this, so that they don’t have to be defensive or try to block discussion with people because they feel that they don’t have a strong position. And all these accusations about Jesus as composite myth, the early deification of Jesus, paganizing influences in the church, the corruption of scripture, a lot of the arguments that are out there, they are weak arguments, and they have been disproven again and again, so it’s useful to know that and to hear the argument that refutes these skeptical atheist challenges. So if people are interested in strengthening their faith, then well that’s what the book’s for. Yes. Yes. I think there’s something to be said for just not ignoring the difficult questions and difficult issues but actually—when you dig in and dive in, you actually see the profundity of the Christian worldview and how it makes sense of reality, it makes sense of science, it makes sense of what we see and experience and know in our world and in ourselves, and it always serves to strengthen your faith and your witness for Christianity. I think that that’s a good word. Is there anything else you’d like to add, Julie? Before we wrap up? Any other thoughts? I think just thank you for inviting a share, and I do hope that others out there who haven’t come to faith might consider at least exploring the possibility and that others stand strong in their faith, because we’re going to need to. Yes, yes. You have an extraordinary story, Julie. I again am so impressed with the intentionality and the diligence, the pursuit to really look for truth, truth and you found Truth with a capital T and not only truth intellectually, but you found truth in the person of Jesus. As not only a compelling figure for all of history but also for your life. That’s a really beautiful thing. It’s obvious. Your passion is obvious. And I do hope that those who are listening will take a closer look at her story and the way she methodically courses through all these difficult questions, through her book, and I do hope that you’ll take a look. And I again will—the name of it is? A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus. A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus, and we will put a link on our episode notes for anyone who’s looking for that. Thank you again, Julie. It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you for telling your story. Thank you, Jana, and to anyone who listens. Thank you. Bless you. Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Julie’s story. You can find out more about her book, A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus, by looking at 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 podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.

Raised in a godless communistic world, former KGB agent and undercover spy Jack Barsky found God when he was least expecting it. To learn more about Jack and his story, visit: www.jackbarsky.com Or read Jack’s book Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America 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. No matter who you are, if there’s something common to all of us, it’s that we want to be fully known and fully loved. We long for meaningful relationships. We want our life to have significance and deep meaning, but sometimes what we long for seems quite elusive. Despite outward appearances and even worldly success, we can find ourselves deeply lonely and empty. What happens then? What do you do? Where do you go? Our podcast guest today had a life with all the thrill and adventure of a spy novel. That’s because he was a spy, a genuine spy. Raised in Communist Germany, he worked for the KGB as an undercover agent literally. Yet with all of the trappings of worldly excitement and success, something was desperately missing. He didn’t know how or where to find it. As a Communist, religion and God were not an option. That was only for the undereducated masses. Jack Barsky’s story is one filled with dramatic twists and turns and transparency as he confronts his own dark night of the soul. He knew he was looking for something more than his own seemingly exciting yet shallow, empty life. Even though he may not have been looking for God, God was looking for him. Jack came not only to know about God, he came to know and be known, love and be loved by God himself. He came to find a life of satisfaction, fullness, and peace that had eluded him for so long. Come join me as Jack tells his journey from atheism to belief. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jack. It’s wonderful to have you today. I’m delighted to be here. As we’re getting started, just so the listeners can get to know a little bit about who you are, even just right now, can you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about who you are? Well, my name is Jack Barsky. I currently reside in the beautiful state of Georgia, in the suburbs, southeastern suburbs of Atlanta, with my wife, Shawna, and my soon-to-be 10-year-old daughter, Trinity. I retired from corporate life about 4 years ago, I spent some 35 years having a career in information technology, including executive-type management. But four years ago, I became a public figure, and at that point, it was time to say goodbye to corporate because my life story does not sit very well with a lot of companies. I did some things that are a little bit out of the ordinary. And I described all of this in my memoir, Deep Undercover, which was released three years ago. And so what I’m doing now, I’m engaged in public speaking. I do interviews such as this one. I write blogs, and I’m working on some other things that are not very much related to my career in corporate but are more in the creative sector. Wonderful. Wow. That sounds exciting. And for anyone who’s listening, I will definitely put the name of your book and your blog and where we can follow you in the episode notes, so you can find out more information about Jack there. So I’m so excited to get into your life. You obviously, like you said, have become a public figure because of the extraordinary life that you’ve lived. Let’s take it back to set the context for this extraordinary by talking about where you grew up, your understanding of God, your family, your culture. What was that world like? Well, it started very ordinary, to put it mildly. I was born in 1949 in the easternmost part of what was, at the time, the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. That place became eventually the German Democratic Republic, a strong ally and pretty much dominated ally to the Soviet Union and very much dominated by Soviet influence. I was born into a small village. My parents were both teachers. And my first home was on the third floor of an elementary school building. That was pretty good because this was—World War II, particularly in the east, did a lot of damage to the country. Massive destruction—apartment buildings, cities, factories. I mean it was a wasteland, and probably the best thing was to be able to grow up in the country because we had the ability to scrounge up some food here and there that was outside of the assigned ration. The assigned ration for an adult for about ten years, still ten years after the end of the war, was about 1500 calories. That’s below a subsistence level. But it was like a place where you cannot imagine to get out of there and go out in the world and make a way and have an interesting life. What did it for me was God gave me a pretty decent intellect, so I did well in elementary and middle school, which allowed me to go on to gymnasium, which then allowed me to go on, and I aced high school, and then that got me into a good university. I studied chemistry, and I pretty much aced that as well. I’m going to stop right there and talk about God. Okay. Before we go there, let’s . . . So you grew up in, like you said, a Soviet-occupied section of Germany. It was communistic. So I presume, with that, then there was little to know reference of God. Exactly. So what did that look like? What was the belief? Or what was the religion, I guess you could say, in a secularized sense. What did that look like? It’s very interesting. My mother came from what I truly believe a Christian household, but my mother actually, for a little while, sang in a church choir, and she would talk about it, but then she had to stop because my father was a party member and he wanted to have a career, and it was suggested that she separate from the church. God was never mentioned in our house. I never saw a Bible. There was the ability to get religious education on a voluntary basis for a little while in elementary school, but my father did not allow me to attend. So fundamentally I grew up without God in my life. What we were fed from kindergarten on was Communist ideology, Marxism, Leninism. As it is fit to teach your children at a young age and then as they grow older and so forth, and it became so dominant—to me, Marxism Leninism was the only valid approach to life and interpretation of what life was all about, and there was no doubt. In school, we didn’t even have an academic subject that you could call religions of the world. No. We had Scientific Marxism and Leninism as a subject to study. So that does become a religion because this belief does not hold up to intellectual critique, but we didn’t even think about critiquing it. It was all we ever heard. So yeah, there was no God in my life. And one other thing: We did celebrate some Christian holidays. We had Christmas, and it was a pagan holiday. For us, the main figure at Christmas was Santa Claus. I had no idea that most of the world was celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. We had Easter, and there was no cross in Easter. It was just about the Easter Bunny, and really, the worst corruption of a holiday that I can think of was the Day of Ascenscion. In Germany, it’s called Himmelfahrt, and I remember this was a day when young men, my father being one of them, would go out on a hike, either with bicycles or just on foot, with enough beer in tow to come back drunk. That was the Day of Ascension. Kind of an interesting interpretation there, yes. Indeed. One other thing: The first time I opened a Bible, I was about maybe 12 years old. I found one in the home of my other set of grandparents, and curious as I was, I started reading it, from page one, and as I’m progressing, I hit this section where you have about a page and a half of genealogy and who begat whom, and that brought me to pieces, and I thought, “Well, that’s not the kind of book I want to read.” Of course, if you want to introduce somebody to faith, you start with the gospel, not with a few pages into Genesis. So it just was not anything interesting. You put it away when you were 12. You went on with this godless kind of mindset into university. You were obviously very bright. You said you studied chemistry. And then you got out of university, and I presume the same kind of, in a sense, Communistic dogma was prevalent there at university? Yeah, no, absolutely. I joined the Communist Party in my first year as a student, and we continued to study. That was part of our curriculum, Marxist philosophy, economic theory, and so forth. And to me, when I thought about churchgoing Christians, I thought they were all the stupid people and the weak people who needed religion as a crutch, and there was a level of disdain that we were above all of that, us the elite, because clearly I was on a path to joining the ruling elite in East Germany. That’s not an exaggeration. Wow. So you had your path set out before you. You were very bright, obviously very ambitious, and you were noticed in some way, I’m sure, as someone who stood out among your peers as being perhaps special in some way. Why don’t you walk us through the next part of your journey? Yeah. I was particularly because I received a scholarship that was a national scholarship that was handed out to very few students. The chance of getting that was one in 3,000. And, as you may imagine, in Communist countries, the secret service, the internal police, kept records on everybody. There was a file for every single individual, with minor exceptions. But anyway, the East German intelligence service, which was called the Stasi, as well as the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service, would periodically look into these records to find people that they might want to recruit. And so, that way, the KGB found me. And introduced themselves, and it became a rather lengthy process of recruitment. I had an informal relationship with a KGB agent while I was still at university, and actually for one of those years—the informal relationship was almost two years—for one of those years, I already was employed by the university as an assistant professor. Anyway, that informal relationship was a mutual feeling out because what I guessed but didn’t know for sure is that they were looking at me for one of the most difficult jobs in terms of espionage, and that is becoming an illegal. In other words, get to a target country and live as an illegal with an assumed identity, rather than going someplace as a diplomat or a student but still under your own name, and so I actually signed up. I was 24 years old when I left university and joined the KGB full time. I can’t imagine what that might have been like. Were you daunted by what was put before you and the responsibility upon you? Or did it seem exciting? There was a mix of emotions. The decision wasn’t super easy because, as you can imagine, becoming an illegal undercover agent would require you to become somebody else, deny everything that happened to you in your life up to that point, and separate from everybody you knew, including your own culture, but from everybody you knew. That includes parents, siblings, friends, and for me, probably the worst part was that I had to leave my beloved basketball team. I was a basketball maniac in those days. And I had a career. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I was going to wind up a tenured professor at that university, and that was my dream job, but then there was the flattery that went with the fact that you were recruited by the most powerful organization on the planet to do some really, really special work in service of the only cause that I knew was worth sacrificing for. You add to this the sense of adventure, the ability to travel, and the allure of sort of living outside of legality. Because I knew that as a secret agent you would live pretty much very often outside of the law. So that eventually won in terms of that tug of war, whether I should stay or I should go. And so I signed up and got two years’ worth of training in Berlin and another two years’ worth of training in Moscow. I studied English. Initially, I was directed towards West Germany but because of my talent to acquire another language, I became a dream candidate because I got to a point where I was able to imitate the American idiom of English well enough to pretend to have been born in the United States, with the explanation of the residual German accent that my mother was German and I grew up bilingual, and that worked really well. So in 1978 I showed up in the United States, entered the United States with a false passport which I destroyed on my second day, and pulled out of a secret compartment a certified copy of a birth certificate with the name of Jack Barsky, so Jack Barsky had arrived in the United States. The real, the original Jack Barsky had passed away at the age of eleven. The KGB stole that identity and managed to acquire a genuine copy of a birth certificate, and that was not unusual. The KGB has done this many, many times, and in those days, it was okay to operate. If you had enough cash, you didn’t need ID. You could get on a plane without showing ID, and so I wound up in New York City and slowly, methodically, carefully acquired two key documents that would allow me to operate as a regular member of American society, and that was a driver’s licence and Social Security card. And that took me about a year. And my first job, by the way—I had to find something where they wouldn’t do a lot of background checks and you wouldn’t need a resume, so I decided to try my luck as a bike messenger in Manhattan. And that worked out pretty well. I worked for 2-1/2 years as a bike messenger and became a real street urchin. I got to know the city very well, and in New York, it’s catch as catch can and it’s survival of the fittest, so as a bicycle rider, you’re the most vulnerable in traffic, and sometimes the worst offenders were the pedestrians, who would totally ignore you, and I held my own. Let’s put it this way. And I became a real New Yorker, you know, quite aggressive. And then we decided, the KGB decided to send me to university again, to college, and I studied information technology. From the moment I entered the US till the moment I quote-unquote quit, and I did quit service for the KGB, was about 10 years. I quit in 1988, and now, of course, the question is, “How did you get away with quitting?” Exactly. How could you leave such a strong, strong, powerful- Yeah. I have a really good story, and I think it must have been, in some way, the Holy Spirit, because I quit for a very good reason. Not because I liked life in the United States that well. I liked the material comfort and all that. I was not yet materially so comfortable, as a matter of fact. This is what happened: In ’88, the KGB wanted me to return back home because they were concerned. There was some indication that the FBI was investigating me. And so, for me, from a selfish perspective, it would have been, “Yeah! I finally get to go home.” I had a lot of dollar savings on account which, in East Germany, was worth a fortune, and the Russians also promised to let me have a house. I mean I would have returned a hero, well respected. I had received the second-highest decoration of the Soviet Union the year before, but there’s one thing that kept me here, and this is when I think—when God really started tugging at my heart and sort of softening the hard-core egomanical individual that I was. I had, at the time, an 18-month-old child, a daughter, and I had fallen in love with that girl. And that was totally unexpected. When I tell people, I call this an unexpected assault of unconditional love. I don’t know where that came from, and I can only think that God started moving in my life. I had no idea that He was doing that, but it was a really tough decision because, by defying the KGB, I risked a lot, possibly life. And there was also the chance that the FBI actually was on my tail. But love won, and I told the KGB that I had contracted HIV/AIDS, which in those days was clearly a death sentence. There was no cure. And they bought this, and as a matter of fact, they informed my family that I had died from AIDS. And there’s an entry in the Social Security register in East Germany that says—Albrecht Dittrich was my birth name in Germany—died in 1988. So that the end of that, and I became . . . . I disappeared into the crowd. I became a regular middle-class American citizen. Pretty soon, I forgot that I ever spied for the KGB. I had a good career in corporate America. The mother of this young child, who I had married . . . . This is an interesting wrinkle here. I met her. She was originally from South America, from Guyana, and she confided me that she was in the country illegally, so I married her to allow her to get a green card, which is really odd because here’s the illegal spy making another illegal legal. Yes! That’s ironic. But, you know, the decision was made. I’m staying with our daughter. I had moved in with the wife that I married, and when the coast was clear and I was pretty safe that the KGB wasn’t chasing after me, one day I went to my wife, and I said, “Hey, why don’t we buy a house?” And that was pretty much the turning point. We bought a house. We had another child. House in the suburbs. Moved to another house. And everything was fine until, nine years after I quit, the FBI introduced themselves. Ah. And that was a good thing. The story of my life has a lot of dots that you would not expect to be connected. The probability of things happening that way is very, very low, and when I put this all together—there are many, many other situations that I’m going to mention here, but here’s one: In 1992, a Russian national defected to the West, and he was a retired archivist at the KGB who, at one point, was really ticked off at the KGB and the Russian system, and he started copying files by hand. Smuggling out files. And he had three suitcases full of typed up notes that he took with him that were . . . . No, he didn’t take them with him. The British intelligence actually extracted this from his dacha. And amongst those copious notes was my name. Not much else. But Jack Barskys, there aren’t too many, so when the FBI got that name, they said, “We’re going to find him,” and they found me. They found the one Jack Barsky that acquired a Social Security card at the ripe old age of 35. And that’s what led them to me. And so they introduced themselves. Their idea was that they wanted me to cooperate. Now, there were some folks within the FBI who just wanted to put me in jail, but here’s another lucky circumstance, so to speak: The fellow who was the lead investigator had studied me very carefully, and he insisted that I would cooperate, and so they took that risk, and he turned out to be right. And he is now a good friend of mine. As a matter of fact, he is godfather to my daughter Trinity, so you see all these connections? It’s phenomenal. It is. It is. But at this point I still don’t have God in my life. At least I’m not aware that He is doing stuff behind the scenes to eventually . . . to set me up. Because I’d compare the situation like when a fisherman goes out and throws out the bait and is very careful, and he’s looking for a nibble and maybe a bite, and then he reels in the catch very slowly until they finally land the catch, and I think I was nibbling. I just didn’t know yet. You just didn’t know. The Lord was working behind the scenes, but you were being drawn, I guess like you say . . . . The first hint of that was that unexpected unconditional love that you had for your daughter. And you were wondering where that came from. But then obviously your steps are being ordered. You left the KGB. You connected with the FBI. You cooperated with them I guess, since you were essentially dead to the KGB at that point. You know, I’m curious. The life of an undercover agent, KGB. I mean, we’ve all seen the movies and the films and the excitement and the thrill that’s associated with that. In your life, with all of those kind of trappings of excitement and adventure, were you feeling fulfilled as a person? I mean, I know you were very bright, and you were very driven and passionate about your mission. How were you feeling just personally during that time? Was it fulfilling for you? Okay. First of all, the excitement was only in spurts. The life of an agent can be rather boring. There’s a lot of waiting. But to answer the question as to whether I was fulfilled or not, emotionally I was not, but I did not allow myself to probe too much into it. So I lived a rather shallow life in that respect. I had no deep relationships at all. The woman I was married to . . . . It was a marriage of convenience. She was very pretty, the mother of Chelsea, the 18-month-old I was talking about. Very pretty. And I did everything to make a good life for us, but I didn’t have any close friends. You can’t while you’re undercover. While you’re living a life in secrecy. Neither male friends nor did the female relationship yield anything. I never got depressed, so I was just emotionally so hardened, based on my upbringing and some things that happened during my childhood and as an adolescent, that I was able to just exist that way. Fulfillment you can’t know . . . . You’re absolutely right. That hole that people are talking about was in me that was not . . . it wasn’t filled. But I didn’t realize that I had it until there was a crisis, a real bad crisis in my life. Up until that point, everything worked. I quit the KGB, and I was caught by the FBI, and they said, “Okay, you can stay here.” Good. Fine. I was untouchable in that respect, but at one point, my marriage started falling apart, and my kids were old enough to move out, and that was exactly the very time when Shawna, the administrative assistant, entered my life. I was in a deep emotional crisis where I became aware of that hole, and it was painful. It was really painful. And the lengthy divorce proceedings were . . . . That was the first time that I actually cried in solitude, by myself, secretly. So wow. It’s not surprising, I guess, having grown up in Germany and having build almost an armor, this fortitude that you have not only externally in terms of your tough persona but internally in your emotional sense of self, to be so guarded but yet you were vulnerable to your daughter’s love, and then you were vulnerable again in a broken marriage. And that’s only human, right? It’s just human. You said the key word. Armor. And the first time that armor was pierced was by an 18-month-old girl. So then what happened next? What the next turn in your journey? When I was done with the debriefing by the FBI, which took several weeks, and I passed a lie detector test, I was told that I would be allowed to stay in the country. I would even be allowed to keep the stolen name. So if I had to change that name, it would have been very disruptive to my life and my family, because we were so much integrated into US society, so it sort of became normal life. I focused on the career. I climbed the corporate ladder. And then I got my dream job at the same time—which is like the timing was incredible—the same time my daughter Chelsea, the one for whom I stayed behind, was highly recruited and eventually was hired to play division one basketball at a college out of Pennsylvania, so at the very same time I got this job offer for the Chief Information Officer at a sizable company, and the job was phenomenal. I could use all the talents and everything that I had accumulated up to that point. And here comes the next connection. And that’s another—it works better if my wife talks about it because this is the way she saw it, but I’m going to tell you what she would contribute to this. So I was an executive, and I lost my administrative assistant, and I needed a new one. So HR sent me the resumes for three candidates, and I phone screened them, and so one of them really did something very odd. This was in Princeton, New Jersey, and while we were talking on the phone—and I still remember where I was. I was driving on the highway, going west towards my home—and she volunteered . . . . She says, “Oh, by the way, I’m attending a Bible college.” And it was quite aggressive, and she said, “You know, if that doesn’t work for you, we might as well just stop talking right now and not waste our time.” Now, I don’t know. I had a real good feel about the conversation up to that point, and I had lost my anti-Christian bias because I had hired a bunch of people who were open Christians, and I found out that they were actually pretty smart, not the dumb ones that I thought they might be, and also the most reliable workers. So I had no reason to disqualify the lady, and we brought her in for an interview, and it was just an incredible experience. First of all, she passed the interview. She interviewed with human resources and with a colleague of mine, and I was the last one to talk to her. She was sitting in a small conference room. I opened the door, and I looked at her face, and it hit me. There was something in that face—and she still has it—that’s shining. It’s an aura that is very, very rare. And in a sense, for me, it was love at first sight. I didn’t know what I was falling in love with. She was quote-unquote not my type, and I had no business—you know, I’m 20 years older than she is, and I was going to hire somebody, but she was just so attractive. Not in a sexual sort of way. But the aura around her. And so we hired her. And this is her part of the story. She, at the time, was looking for a job. She was in a personal crisis. The man she was married to turned out to be a con man who had stolen a lot of money from her. So she picked herself up and says—you know, for a while she was out of work. “I’ve got to go find another job.” She got, at the same time, three job offers from three companies, and I’m not surprised why. And then she prayed to God and asked for guidance, which one to take, and she determined that it would have to be a company that would give her a sign-on bonus. Now at her level, sign-on bonuses are not normal. Administrative assistants typically don’t get sign-on bonuses, but we had a bit of a mismatch. HR maxed me out as far as how much I could offer, and I said, “Well, how about if we close the gap between the offer and what she would like to make and give her a sign-on bonus?” So she got a sign-on bonus. And she will also tell people that God told her that there was a task for her at that place. She didn’t know what it was and who it was all about. She, for a while, thought it was a young lady who was misbehaving in some ways, that she had to just help her to straighten out her ways. So we started working together. Now the seating arrangements in that company were all open floor. I didn’t have an office, so my assistant was just diagonally opposite from me, and we were pretty much in each other’s space. Whatever she said out loud, I would hear, and vice versa. So we got to know each other pretty well. And one time I asked her. I said, “You know, you have this glow on your face and this aura. Where does it come from?” And she blurted out, and this is absolutely true, she blurted out, “It must be Jesus!” So it was my time to roll my eyes, not physically but sort of- In your mind. Yes. In my mind. Because I could not understand how somebody would have that much of an impact, somebody who I at the time knew she doesn’t talk to and who most likely does not exist, so that’s where I was at the time. I was an agnostic, and I denied the existence of God or even Christ and never mind Christ as God. But this is when the Lord started reeling me in very, very carefully. So you were going through a difficult time but you met someone who came into your life who had a glow about them, Shawna obviously. And she attributed it to Jesus, of all people. So I’m sure that took you aback. So how did your story then progress? Well, as I indicated, it looks like God was starting to reel me in very carefully. I had an established pattern to help people in my organization to achieve as much as they can achieve based on their potential, and so I would sit down with—and I had, at one point, 200 people in my organization—and I actually sat down with each one of them, one on one, to try to figure out, who are you? And where can you go? Where do you want to go? And I did the same thing with my new administrative assistant, and I remember that she was going part time to a Bible college, and I said, “Why don’t you give me an essay that you wrote? I want to know how well you write.” So she gave me an essay about the book of Ruth. That was an interesting pick. Because the book of Ruth—when you talk about this, you can take it as straight literature. That would be the farthest away from somebody saying she’s trying to evangelize me. I read it as a story. Right. And she said that was Holy Spirit inspired. She said that was the only essay she got a B for, but she picked that instead of giving me one where she got an A to impress the boss. So I read it, and I tell her, “You write well. I guess I have to, in order to really get a good idea how good it is, I have to read the original,” but she was prepared. She has a Bible in her desk. And she gave me that Bible, so this was the first time in my entire life that I opened the Bible, other than this failed attempt as a child, and read something in there on purpose. We’re now looking at another turn of that reel to get that fish a little closer. I had this brainstorm. Holy Spirit inspired, I’m guessing. Because it just occurred to me that I had just read a book that is by far the most read book in the history of man with no close second, and I always was really proud of my wide and deep learning, education about the world, and here’s this one book that I never read. So I asked Shawna if I could keep the book, and she said, “No. I think I can do something better.” She gave me a set of CDs, so I had a one-hour commute to work, so that gave me two hours listening to the Bible, from Genesis all the way to Revelation. And so now—it got quite interesting, particularly since I had an expert on the Bible right in my office. And when I had questions I would ask her. And we obviously didn’t do this on the open floor. This was Princeton, New Jersey. So we, at one point, made arrangements on our respective calendars, to meet a half hour before the actual work day started to go over some of my questions. And we’re now calling that, jokingly, undercover Bible study. That makes sense. Which it was. Yes. It was sort of on company time in a very secular place in a very secular company, talking about the Bible. And here comes the next pull to get that fish really close to land, when Shawna told me, “You’ve got to listen to this radio program. I think you’re going to like it.” And I said, “What’s the radio program?” “Let My People Think. There’s this man who—I know you’re going to love him.” So I turned this on on a—I don’t know. It was on my way to work one morning. It was a recording. And there’s Ravi Zacharias. And one of his favorite subjects was morality. And morality was something I had been struggling with because I had considered myself, throughout my life, even as a boy starting out, to be a good person. I never really harmed somebody on purpose, and yet I had served, which I knew at that time very clearly I had done immoral things and I had served a significantly immoral cause, so that’s why I really listened very closely, and so the case that Dr. Zacharias made there was that morality cannot come from the inside, which I have to agree with, because my morality—my internals were totally messed up. So there had to be somehow a moral law that is given from the outside. And the next step is—and this is Ravi’s logic—and this is why I really love Ravi Zacharias’ writing and his teachings. He said, “Where there is a law, there has to be a lawgiver.” At that point, I very quickly became a deist. I had to agree with them that there has to be a God in some way because that lawgiver couldn’t have been another person because I already knew about all the evil that had happened in history and the evil caused by men. So now I was a deist. I wasn’t a Christian yet. But, you know, Shawna took care of that. She constantly—on Monday, she would tell me what church was like and they have this great music and . . . and one day I said—and I said it. She didn’t invite me. I said, “Why don’t you take me one day?” Now you have to understand, for background, I had never set foot into a church other than Catholic, a church where there’s a service going on, and the Catholic service that I attended with my ex-wife really did nothing for me. It was just too ritualistic, and I just sat there and let it pass. So here I am, for the first time, going into a church where there was some strong faith displayed. This is what I sort of determined based on what Shawna told me. And so, as a matter of fact, I was concerned. Literally I was afraid to go in there by myself. That was a Saturday afternoon service. We were supposed to meet in the parking lot, and Shawna was late. I waited and I waited, and when she finally showed up, I made her go in front of me because I was afraid that I would be intercepted at the door as the new guy and maybe just evangelized right then and there. Not even close. That’s not what happened? Not at all. You know, I walk in there. The music was really good. It was modern Christian music. Very well played. And then in comes the pastor for his sermon, and would you believe this fellow had the same kind of glow on his face as I originally saw Shawna display? And of course, as it happens to a lot of believers and happened to me, that the sermon that he preached was meant for me. Right. It’s funny how that happens. Yeah. And God speaks to all of us and somehow it’s just amazing how we can individualize the message, and this one was about God’s love, and I didn’t count how many times the pastor used the word love, but it was exactly what I needed to hear, because I was in this crisis, and I was actually hungry for love. Well, that’s not unusual, but I was in a state where I couldn’t deny it anymore. I had to admit it to myself, and that made it rather painful, and here I’m hearing the pastor talk about the love of Christ, the love of God, and I did something that was, at the time, for me, totally atypical. At the end of the service, I walked up to the pulpit and approached the pastor. I don’t know what possessed me. And I told him, I said, “You have a phenomenal delivery.” This is what I said, rather than, “I really like your message.” You know, a passive-aggressive kind of approach. And obviously he knew I was a new guy, and we talked a little bit, and he found out that I’m not a Christian, and he called up his assistant pastor, and he asked me, “Is it okay if we lay hands on you?” And I said, “Okay.” Now, gee, if somebody had told me before I entered the church that the pastor would want to lay hands on me, I would not have entered. But at that moment, at that point in time, it was logical. And I had no problem with it. So, yeah, for those who are listening, when you say, “lay hands on you,” what did you mean by that? To pray for you? Yeah. They touched me on my back and bowed their heads and said a prayer over me. And how did that make you feel? Loved. By strangers who represented God. Now that didn’t make me a Christian at that point. It doesn’t work that way. But I went back to that church because I liked it, and the message was always good. The music was good. And it sort of became part of my life. You had listened to the Bible all the way through. You were listening to Ravi Zacharias, so your head—it sounds like your head and your heart were both being drawn in some way towards God, in terms of both truth and love. Correct, and the head actually was leading that move towards God. Because I’m wired to be a thinker, and Dr. Zacharias really—I listened to more of his talks. His logic could not be defeated by anything that I could come up with, but my heart hadn’t really followed, and this just happened at an odd place, at a moment where I really . . . . You wouldn’t expect it. I was playing golf with a friend of mine, and as he was looking for his ball and I was waiting, standing around, it was a nice bright summer day with some clouds up in the sky, and I was looking around and was looking at the sky, and it all of a sudden hit me, and I said to myself—and I may have said it out loud—”I know you’re God. I believe you’re God.” So that was my moment when I became internally a Christian, and within a couple of weeks, I actually went to the altar, and here’s another interesting tidbit. That church didn’t have an altar call. Never did. But one time at the end of service I had this pull, and I just had to go up there, and the pastor asked, “Can I help you?” And I said, “I would like to give my life to Jesus Christ,” and the next 15 minutes are a blank in my memory. Shawna remembers because she was there. The pastor actually . . . . People were really moving out. The pastor actually went on the PA system and told the congregation a little bit about me. He knew about my background. And then there was applause, and everybody rejoiced, and I don’t remember any of that. So I was, and still am, a Christian. And I’ve got to just finish up with that church. Six months later, pastor asked me to testify on Easter. I testified three times, three services. He never asked me to tell him what I was going to say, and the interesting thing is also that this was a church—the three services were attended by about 1,000 people. And this was in the place where I lived, where I worked, and nothing ever left the church. In other words, the fact that here is an ex-Communist agent who became a Christian, it didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t make the media. It didn’t get to my company. And I think God just put a mantle over this because I wasn’t ready to be a public figure. I wasn’t mature enough. So you were protected in a way. I believe so. It was just . . . . If you think about it, I didn’t think about this whole thing, but after the fact, there are a thousand people that live in my neighborhood and some of whom could have been coworkers, and it just did not trickle out. It doesn’t make any sense. There was not a single journalist in that audience or historian or teacher. Nobody even came up to me and . . . . I just disappeared back into the crowd. Wow. Wow. So yes, the Lord knows what you need and what you could handle at the time, so there was a way of protecting you, I suppose. I do wonder . . . you spoke about the glow of Shawna when you met her and then you spoke of the same kind of glow of the pastor, that there seemed to be something about them, and I wonder, in your journey, at the end of the day, have you found that internal peace or found that glow that seems to be common among some Christians that you know? I only can tell you what my experience is when I speak with others who don’t know me. More often than not, particularly here in the South—as I told you, I live in Georgia now. People guess that I’m a Christian. I don’t think I have a glow. I can’t see it in the mirror. But I think there is something about the certainty that comes from our faith that changes us and the presence of the Holy Spirit clearly is manifested in Shawna’s face, who is, by the way, now my wife and the mother of my 9-year-old Trinity. I think that change is externalized to some extent. Have I found peace? You know, we struggle sometimes. We’re going through hard times, but I have learned to trust that God knows what he’s doing, and in the end, it’s His plan, and His plan has been excellent for me, and so why should that change? So my favorite Bible verse is Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I’m God,” because being still has not been part of my mental and emotional makeup, but I’ve learned to be patient, and I’ve learned to trust. Wow. That’s wonderful! Well, as we’re kind of concluding here, before we do that, I would love to hear your thoughts and your wisdom. You have so beautifully pictured God as the great fisherman reeling you in through your journey and that you started at a very skeptical atheistic place, very skeptical of God, and I wondered if you could speak to someone who might be in that place right now, who for some reason is listening and is curious, what you might say to that curious skeptic if you had a moment. Well, it depends upon where they are, and I think the appeal that I can make that is the most convincing would be to the skeptical intellectual who just hasn’t gotten very deeply into the Bible or into our faith. Just do a little more research. Read some of the good writing that C.S. Lewis published, Ravi Zacharias, and others. Acquaint yourself with the thought behind our faith and understand that God has given us a brain, a heart, and a soul, and He wants all three, and the only thing I can say, what becoming a Christian has done to me, has given me a lot more peace than I had before. And that’s good, because I actually—for the first time in my life, I actually like myself. And a lot of people don’t. But if God loves you, why can’t you like yourself? And it makes life so much easier, particularly to deal with circumstances that are not always favorable. That’s pretty much what I can say here. That’s pretty powerful. Especially that last part you said about, that you like yourself for the first time. There’s something very wonderful about not only liking yourself because then that reflects onto others in the way that, not only you treat yourself, but the way that you treat others, and there’s such a . . . almost a domino effect with that, when you’re grounded in the love of God. It’s easier to give that love to others. You’re so right. You’re so right. And it’s hard to describe, but every day I walk around and I have no more fear of strangers. I love people. I love interacting with people. And I know that I am—because of the Holy Spirit, I do well with people. And I’m not a street evangelist, not by a long shot, but I think I evangelize by example, by being kind, by being helpful, and showing the example the way I live. And I think that’s probably a good word for the Christians who might be listening. If you were to speak with them, I think that that’s very powerful as well, in terms of how you display Christianity as just by being grounded in the love of God and who you are and then giving that love away, it sounds like. I must mention this one instance. Because you mentioned the word love again, so because it really hit me one time that—and it was spontaneous—that love is the one quality that makes us human, and that’s the quality that we get from God, so here’s this instance. I gave a presentation at Microsoft, and at the end, one of the members of the audience asked me, “So with all the stuff that you did and the crazy life that you lived, what is the one lesson that you could share with us?” And I didn’t hesitate, and I said, “Oh. Three words. Love conquers all.” It turns out the questioner was a Christian and is a good friend of mine now. Oh. That really does sum it up, doesn’t it? I mean love is that thing that sometimes seems so elusive. It’s the thing that we all want and desire, and it’s there waiting for you. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, thank you so very much, Jack, for coming on board and telling us your amazing journey from the other side of the world and the other side of your view of reality to one that is beautifully grounded in the love of God and the peace of God and the truth of God, that you demonstrate a life and a faith that’s all encompassing—head, heart, and life. And that’s an incredible story for us all to take inspiration from, really. So thank you so much for coming on today to tell your story. You are very welcome. Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Jack’s story. You can find out more about Jack by visiting his website at jackbarsky.com. That’s B-A-R-S-K-Y. Or for his full story, you can read his book, Deep Undercover, which you can find at Amazon and other great places. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. I hope you enjoyed it. Subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and network if you wouldn’t mind. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where will be listening to the other side.

University professor Dr. Mary Poplin was “spiritual, not religious” and sampled many ideologies until a vivid dream made the Jesus of Christianity undeniable to her. Listen as Mary tells her story. Mary is author of the book  Is Reality Secular?:  Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews (2014) Mary‘s reflection on her time spent with Mother Teresa is written in  Finding Calcutta:  What Mother Teresa Taught Me about Meaningful Work and Service (2008) And, her academic writing on teaching in challenging environments is  Highly Effective Teachers of Vulnerable Students:  Practice Transcending Theory 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 episode, we listen to the story of someone who has lived as a nonbeliever and then became a Christian, someone who understands from the inside what each of those worlds are like. One of the most fascinating discoveries in my research with over 50 former atheists was the role that some kind of religious or mystical experience played in their conversion to Christianity. Dreams, visions, encounters with Jesus Christ, encounters with Satan and dark spirituality, extraordinary providential circumstances—these all reshaped their understanding of the possible reality that there was something more, something real, beyond this universe. Some of these experiences were invited in a way, after someone had opened themselves up, had prayed or challenged God or even Satan to show up. Some of these otherworldly experiences were not invited but palpably encountered nonetheless. So sobering were they that it caused them to change their minds and even their lives, dramatically reorienting themselves to a new understanding of reality as something more than they once thought possible. That is the story that we will hear today from our guest. As a rational intellectual university professor, she didn’t know what she was looking for. As someone who was spiritual but not religious, she definitely wasn’t looking for the Judeo-Christian God. But she experienced an unexpected, powerful, and vivid dream and suddenly found herself profoundly believing in Jesus Christ. She came to see that reality was much more than she realized, much more than merely grounded in this world. Forgiveness and peace were found in the real person of Jesus Christ. It changed everything for her. Dr. Mary Poplin is now a university professor and strong advocate of the Christian worldview. I hope you’ll listen in to hear her compelling journey from nonbelief to belief. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mary. It’s so great to have you. It’s great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Maybe your academic background and perhaps where you live? Okay. Well, I started as a schoolteacher, and I taught for a few years, and then I went to the University of Texas to graduate school and then I became a professor. I spent three years at the University of Kansas a long time ago, but I’ve been at Claremont Graduate University as a professor since 1981, I think. A long time. I’m old. Oh, no! And that’s in Claremont, California. It’s in the Los Angeles area, where I live. And then I occasionally come back to my hometown, where my sisters live, and that’s where I am right now because of the virus, so we’re all teaching online anyway, and so I’m teaching from here in Texas. What is your focus of study or your specialty? I started out in special education, and then I went to teacher education largely, and now I would say my research is on teacher. Actually, I love to study highly effective teachers in the most troubled schools, so that’s what I study, and I’ve worked with my students. We’ve done a piece of research and a book on that. And my second thing is that I love to study Judeo-Christian thought and how it impacts different fields, and so I did a book on the four major worldviews, trying to explain what secular humanism and materialism and pantheism were as related to Christianity. And what is the name of that book? Oh. That’s a good question. I believe it is Is Reality Secular? Is Reality Secular? Yes. I took that line from a Dallas Willard book, actually. Okay. He let me steal it. He said I could have anything. Oh! Wonderful, wonderful. Yeah, Dallas Willard was a pretty extraordinary man. A very amazing man. Yeah. So you’re someone who obviously is a thinker, someone who’s thought deeply about issues of worldview, of life, of perspective, but the Christian worldview and thinking about your life in those terms certainly wasn’t where you started. So let’s back up now and let’s go early in your life. Tell me about where you grew up. Was there any concept of God in your home, your family, your friends, among your friends or community? I grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, and my dad was—I mean, my mother was too, but my dad very specifically was a Christian. And so he took us to Sunday school every Sunday, and we usually went to church. We went to Methodist church. I would say that I came away from that church not exactly knowing. I think I had one Sunday school teacher who was pretty on target about who Jesus was, but a Methodist church was already kind of leaning towards secular humanism, really, and so when I left that experience, and when I got into graduate school, I really did leave Christianity for a long time. So, when you grew up, you had I guess you could say a tacit knowledge of God? You went to church. It was in your culture, so to speak, but I take it from what you’re saying that you didn’t really take on a belief personally that God exists or that Jesus is real or—well, he may have been historically real, but there really wasn’t much to it for you in your life. Does that- I don’t even know if I thought that deeply. I wasn’t thinking about rejecting it or thinking about accepting it. It just seemed like it was part of the culture in a way, and I had done that by going to Sunday school and church. I did know my dad was different. My dad—we all remember, all four girls. We remember seeing him read the Bible at night before he went to bed. You know, just on the side of his bed. He always had his Bible open before he’d go to sleep, before he’d go in to bed. So I knew that, all of that. And I guess I thought Christians were people who tried to live better maybe. This is something that provided a good moral construct for the family, for their way of life, their living, that sort of thing? Kind of. Yes. Yeah. It sounds like it just wasn’t particularly relevant to you. No. I didn’t dislike it, nor did I adopt it. I remember a couple of times feeling close to God in church as a child but not very many. Okay. So obviously it sounds like there was somewhat of a change when you went to university. Your way of thinking about God or Christianity or religion generally? Why don’t you talk about that? Well, when I got to graduate school, I pretty much rejected it. I knew enough to know that the kinds of things I wanted to do would not be validated by a Christian worldview or Christian beliefs, and so I rejected it really out of desire, other desires. So other desires kind of replaced any interest I had in Christianity. And I didn’t actually become what . . . . I mean some people become atheists, right? But they’re more thoughtful about it, I think. I think I became what I’d call “spiritual but not religious,” and there’s a large group of people in America and around the world, especially in the Western world, who believe that they’re spiritual, which is the way that I wanted to say—and I think they also—wanted to say, “I’m a good person, but I’m not religious. I can be good without God.” And so that’s what I became. So I was vaguely spiritual, which meant that I would sometimes . . . . I’d go to things that were more like pantheist things. Sessions on being spiritual. I tried a couple of different sort of pantheistic things. For a while, I went with a friend to some Buddhist—no, actually it was Hindu—meditation practice. So New Age kinds of things. That’s really what I was doing. So why were you pursuing those kind of spiritual pursuits? Was there something in your life that you just wanted more? Why that? I think because I wanted to, in some ways, suggest that I was a good person, right? Even though I was doing things that, for a good Christian, it would not have been okay. Does that make sense? So it gave you religion without the moral requirements associated with a Judeo-Christian God? Right. No moral requirements. Right. So that was a comfortable place to be I guess, for a while. So this was in graduate school and beyond, maybe, into young adulthood? Yes. When I went to California, I would get involved in sort of spiritual activities that were not Christian. Feminist spirituality, those kind of things. Did you find that intellectually satisfying? Or existentially satisfying? Or? I don’t know if it was satisfying. There was something, I guess, in me that I wanted to say I was spiritual. Right, right. So walk us farther along your journey. What started happening in your life next? Or what started causing you to question that or change that? Well, to tell the truth, I didn’t really question it until I had a particular dream. When I say I didn’t question it, I don’t mean that I knew it was working, right? In retrospect, I thought I was as good as anybody else, right? Even though I was doing things that everybody else was doing and so I kept trying to call myself good, right? But somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that wasn’t working because I had also experienced a lot of depression. So I was on antidepressants a lot. After I got to my job, I was using antidepressants a great deal, and so something was wrong. I don’t know that I worded it that way. I might’ve thought, “Well, I just have this little chemical imbalance, and so these drugs help me.” So then I got tenure. I think it was 1991 or ’92, and that happened in probably May? May, that’s usually when you find out those things. And then, in November—okay, so I was married at the time. My husband was into even weirder things, really, and he and a friend had gone for Thanksgiving to Hawaii, I think, or somewhere, I don’t know. And things were not going that well in our marriage, either. I think I knew he was with other people. And so I spent Thanksgiving alone, and then I had a dream at Thanksgiving, and that dream was really the turning point. So it was the only time I . . . . You know, I have dreams all the time, but they don’t usually make sense, right? You know how they are. There’s bubble gum and something else in there or something. But this dream, I remembered every single detail, and in the dream, there was a part of the dream in color, but I was not in the part that was in color, and I had never dreamed in color, so I was in a long line of people, and we were all dressed in kind of gray robes, to our feet, to our fingertips, so we’re kind of Buddhist looking. And we’re in a line, and we’re not breaking line, we’re not talking to each other, we’re just marching straight ahead. But the odd thing is that we were not on a plane that you could see. It was like we were suspended in a night sky. So here we are, walking towards something. No one knew what it was. And I didn’t know where I was going, and so I kind of leaned out to my left and looked, and it looked like the line sort of snaked around and disappeared. And then I thought, “Well, I must be at the back of the line,” so I looked around to my right, and it looked as though that line didn’t end, either. And then all of a sudden I noticed that we were going to pass by something on the right, and there was a kind of yellowish tinted light coming out from where we were going, on the right of us. And when I got to it, it was a live version . . . . The best way to describe it is it was a live version of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper. So there’s these disciples sitting in disciple-like robes, and they’re in color. And they’re eating. They’re at this table, and they’re eating, and they’re talking to each other, and they’re not paying really us any attention whatsoever, and then all of a sudden I realized that, even those this looked a lot like the Last Supper, Jesus was not there. So there was a seat kind of in the middle that was empty. And then I looked up ahead, and this was a reception line, and we were all going to pass by Jesus, and when I got to Jesus, and I looked at Him, I knew who He was, and all of a sudden, I also knew who I was. And I was deeply embarrassed. I mean, I felt like I was just filled with sin and rottenness and all that, and so I couldn’t look at Jesus any more, and I fell down at His feet, and I started to cry, and in the dream, then, Jesus leans over and puts His hands on my shoulders, and when He touched me, I felt perfect peace. I mean I don’t know how to describe this except that you feel so peaceful you feel almost like you’re not . . . like you don’t have a heavy body attached to you. I don’t know how to describe it other than that. And then I woke up. And when I woke up, the dream was so well connected—that is there weren’t any holes in it. It wasn’t a mishmash of different things like most dreams are. It was very clear, and when I woke up, I knew something had changed and I needed to do something. And so . . . . What did I do after that? Oh. Then, I had a sabbatical coming up, and I’d moved from California to Austin. At that time, I had a little house there, where I had gone to graduate school, and I began to stay there, and I began to pursue people who were in churches. And I told someone who was probably . . . I think they were involved in Campus Crusade. They knew about my conversion. And they started telling people, and then other people would come to me, and that’s how I kind of began to know what Christianity was. So, just to be clear, you just characterized that dream as a moment of conversion. Is that what I’m hearing from you? Yes, I think that’s what I would say. Because it was not something that could be shaken off, right? It was there in me now. And I had always wanted to be spiritual, right? But it became overarching. Now I didn’t know anything really about Jesus, right? I mean I really didn’t know, even though I’d gone to church and stuff. I really didn’t know much. So I started pursuing people, and they started pursuing me in Austin. And they were Christians. They would take me to places. One woman I had met, and within a couple of hours, she invited me to room with her at a woman’s retreat. I mean, that’s pretty radical. She didn’t know me at all. But I went to the retreat, and the first thing I started to notice that was so obvious. These were not professors or particularly in my field. In fact, none of them, I think, were in my field. But the first thing I began to notice is that they lived their life differently. They lived their life differently. They looked healthier. They looked happier. They were clear minded. I think they weren’t confused. They weren’t searching for something that they didn’t have. They were still pursuing growing in Christ, but they weren’t like I had been. There was a contentment associated with what they had found, I guess. Right. And we’re just growing in that, yeah. Did you start reading the Bible to become informed about the person of Jesus? The Bible was really key for me. As an academic, right? You look for the book. Not only did I read the Bible, I ended up reading it over and over, and I would go to these retreats. There were some retreats at monasteries. So one of the kind of unique features of my conversion is that Catholics helped me, Protestants helped me. Even a couple of Orthodox people helped me. And they were Protestants of every kind, from charismatic Protestants to very serious Baptist Protestants. So I did begin to read the Bible, and I began to love the New Testament. In fact, someone had advised me to do this. But when I started reading it, I read the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the New Testament first. And this person asked me once—this guy asked me, “Well, what do you think of your reading? How’s the reading going?” And I said, “Well, I love the Proverbs, I like the New Testament, and the Psalms, they’re okay.” And he said, “So you don’t particularly like the Psalms.” And I said, “Yeah, I don’t particularly like the Psalms,” and then he said to me a very important question, especially the way he phrased it. He said to me, “Do you know why you dislike the Psalms?” And I said, immediately I think, “Yeah, because in the Psalms there’s that one where it says, ‘dash their children on rocks,’ right? There’s a lot of violence in the Psalms,” and he just nodded. He didn’t say a single word other than that. But it really opened up to me, “Okay, so why do I hate the Psalms writer? Why do I not like the Psalms.” And all of a sudden, I think it was that very night after I had had dinner with this person, who was significant in San Diego in helping me, and I was reading the Psalms that night, and I got to 137, the psalm that dashes children on rocks. And when I read it this time, I saw that the Psalms were about good and evil, and those instances were instances of evil, and evil was clearly still in charge of my life, and so that’s how I broke through that barrier. And then I began reading everything, the Old Testament all the way through. I just kept re-reading. And then I decided that . . . . I went to a monastery for a retreat that I think was about a week long. And the abbot who was in charge of it would tell us every night what scriptures he was going to use the next morning, and so he told us, and I went to my room, and I was looking up the scripture, and I was so tired. I couldn’t concentrate. So I thought, “Okay, I’ll write them in my little notebook. I’ll write them, copy them in my notebook, and then in the morning I’ll look at them, at breakfast.” And so, as I copied them, though, I saw how much more I saw in the scriptures when I was writing it, when I was just copying it, so that led me to copy the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the New Testament ultimately during that time. Wow, so you were really getting into the Bible, the scripture, what it meant for you. I’m curious—as you were reading the Bible, particularly the gospels and the stories of Christ and learning who He was, did reading the Bible and Jesus and the gospels help give you an understanding of what had happened to you in your dream? Like Jesus the One who forgives those who are seemingly or feel unforgivable, the One who is the Author of peace? Those things that you experienced, did they come to reality in scripture for you? Well, yes. I don’t think I was thinking about it consciously like you just stated it. I think it was happening. And it’s one thing to know what the scripture says. It’s another thing to then begin to try to live it. Okay, so November was the dream, and then I had a couple of other experiences later in January. So in January, my mother, who grew up in North Carolina—I grew up in Texas—wanted to go back and visit her family, what was left of her family and to visit friends there. And so I took her back, and my mother had grown up in a very tiny Methodist church that was probably about as nominally teaching as the one I was in, and she wanted to go to church, I think largely because she knew that’s where she’d see her friends, and so I took her there, and I remember sitting through the sermon, and there was an older country preacher, and I was thinking, “Well, you know, it’s okay because now I study the Bible, and I had this dream, so this is all right,” and I didn’t pay much attention to his sermon, but it happened it was the first Sunday in January, which means they were going to have Communion. So I’m at the back of this church. It couldn’t have held more than 100 people, I’m sure, but they were going to go up one row at a time, so they’d go up and fill up the area around the altar, and they’d receive Communion and they’d come back to their chairs, and then the next group would go, right? Well, we were in the back, and I thought it would never happen, because when he talked about taking the bread, taking Christ into your body and giving your life to Him, it just came over me that I had to have that Communion, and it was like, it felt like it was forever before I got there. But I finally got there, and I knelt down, and I took the Communion elements, and I didn’t listen to a thing he said. I just looked at them, and I said, “If you are real, please come and get me.” I didn’t say this out loud. And I said it, like, three times, “If you’re real, please come and get me. Please come and get me,” and when I took the elements, I felt the same peace I had felt in that dream, when Jesus had touched me, exactly the same peace, so much so that I thought maybe if I stood up I wouldn’t stay on the ground. That’s how light I felt. But I did stay on the ground, thank goodness! So I got back to my pew, and that, I think is the moment that I really had what you might call a conversion moment. Because now I’m making that commitment. Yes. It was a conscious decision and somehow it wasn’t just made for you, in a sense. It was just something where you actually gave your life in return. Yes. Sounds very, very powerful, like a very powerful moment. Yeah, it was. It was. Now how long ago was that? A long time ago. Because that would’ve been the January of I think ’93 maybe. Or ’92. Okay. So it sounds like you’re . . . . I think the dream is extraordinary, that it would be so powerful that you would come out changed. And then you read the scripture, you were surrounded by Christians, you had that moment of conversion. I can imagine someone listening who may be rather skeptical, thinking, “But she’s an intellectual. How does she know it’s true? I know we can know things are experientally true, but how does she know it’s intellectually true? How does she know she’s not just convincing herself of something?” And I know, as an academic, that’s not the way you roll, in the sense that things have to be, in a sense, intellectually credible or viable before you’ll fully embrace it, I would imagine, on some level. Can you explain how that became a holistic part of your journey, the intellectual aspect of everything else that you were experiencing and learning? Well, to be honest, I think that’s still my calling, right? To continue to understand that and to be able to relate it to intellectuals. So the intellectual piece is, if you really begin to study scripture, you will see that there’s not a single issue we argue about today that’s not in scripture, for example. And this is way jumping ahead to where I am now, okay? I just want to make that clear. I didn’t know this back then. But I did have this draw to scripture. So, for example, when we talk about race. Well, race is talked about all the time in the Bible, right? All of these things. Justice is always talked about in the Bible. The word social justice never appears, and the word justice is the same word in the Bible, in the Hebrew, as righteousness, so there is a clear message in the Bible that justice and righteousness have to be together. You don’t have justice without righteousness, and you don’t have righteousness without justice. And there’s lots of . . . . People talk about women. In the Bible, I mean, you look at any other religion. There’s no religion that has as many women in it. I mean, there’s tons of women, right? And Jesus’ genealogy, which is very unusual, because it lists five women—most genealogies do not list any women. And out of those five women, four of them are actually not Jewish, so we have the issue of culture and race. They’re not Jewish at all. Bathsheba’s not Jewish. Tamar’s not Jewish. So there are these intellectual principles that are embedded in the Bible. And we just haven’t paid much attention to them. You know, Martin Luther King was one of the best at that, especially in terms of race and justice and things like that, so when he says . . . he basically does 1 Corinthians 12 by saying . . . . He says the strange thing is that, for me to be I have to be, you have to be who you have to be, and for you to be fully who you’re supposed to be, I have to be who I’m supposed to be. Then he says that’s the strange way that God’s world is made. And that’s just a summary of 1 Corinthians 12, about the body. The part of the body that you actually think is least useful is actually the most important one. So now, when I look at it intellectually, I have to find ways to insert Christian wisdom into what we’re teaching, which is not Christian wisdom at all. So we usually end up teaching left and right. So we either go too far to the left or too far to the right. When you lose something as large and as monumental and important and true as Christianity in the intellectual world, you lose the moral plumbline. So though a moral plumbline in Christianity. Left and right is talked about all the time in the Bible. I forget how many times. It seems like it’s, I don’t know, 24 or 45 times. And what it says is, “Do not turn to your left or to your right.” Over and over, it says that in the Bible. That’s all we do in the university almost, you know? Right now, it’s left. It used to be right. But all universities came out of Christendom. They started out in monasteries to begin with. There wasn’t even a university in the United States until Johns Hopkins in 1899 that did not claim itself to be Christian. And many, many universities still have that claim even though they don’t particularly use Christian doctrine in their teaching. Because I think now people have just lost track of it. But the scripture still has all this wisdom in it, for all these different issues. But we’re not using them. So that’s where my conversion took me. That’s why I believe I spent so much time in the Bible. Yes. And I suppose that there was something in you, again, in your intellectual curiosity and drive in your work that compares different worldviews, that you wanted to perhaps . . . . I mean, why did you do that kind of comparative study, even after you became a Christian? I think because, when I see Christians in the university, I see that they are like I was. How do you relate this? I still remember, when I came back from Calcutta, speaking at a women’s retreat about Mother Teresa. It was not a retreat. It was a woman’s education leadership conference. It was a breakfast at a leadership conference, which was not just all women, but they wanted me to tell something about Mother Teresa, so I told them small stories, and at the end, a woman in the back stood up, and she said, “Have you had any trouble coming back from Mother Teresa’s?” And when she said that—I obviously had had trouble—I just broke out in tears in front of this audience of 250 school administrator women. And I had been asking the Lord, “What is this? What is this going on with me that I start crying before I go to class?” And I just blurted out—all of a sudden, I guess that’s when the Holy Spirit decided to give me the answer. So I remember I even did this with my hands, I said, you know, “Obviously, I’ve had some trouble.” And then they kind of calmed down, too. And I said, “Okay, so I went to Mother Teresa’s, and I saw Christianity really lived. I know. We’re not all called to that, but I saw it lived. And I came back to teach, and I’m still teaching exactly what I’ve always taught. And I don’t know how to get from here to here, and I feel like a liar.” When I said that, a lot of the women in the audience started to cry. Because we all feel that way, I think. If you’re a strong Christian, you feel like, “Why can’t I take this into my world?” “Why can’t we talk about this in whatever place I’m living in or working in?” So that’s one of my callings. So I do now teach a class called Judeo-Christian Thought Across the Disciplines, and it is a class that anybody from any field can take. We have these classes called trans-disciplinary classes. And so sometimes Christians take it. I mean, there’s always Christians in the class, but sometimes an atheist might take it or somebody who’s just not religious, never really thought of it. Maybe it just fits their schedule that semester, right? But it’s a lovely class because the students have a lot of flexibility on what they can read, and I guide them in Christian reading in their discipline, and then they present it to each other, so it’s kind of like a little intellectual feast in a way. And Christianity is the core of it. It sounds wonderful. It sounds like you have, in a sense, integrated your Christianity into every walk or part of your life, and I’m sure you’ve hopefully found, as when you first had your dream and you encountered these Christians who had this sensibility of peace and joy and purpose, perhaps contentment, that you obviously have found that sort of thing in your life. Yeah. I mean I’m still a sinner. We all are. We all are. Right. So for those who might be listening, if there’s someone who is perhaps spiritual, not religious. Maybe they don’t know what they think about Christianity or where they should look. If they’re curious or wanting to think about things further, what would you say to the skeptic who might be listening to you today? Well, I think we try to push them too fast. I think we try to get them to the time where you say the right thing. And in fact, for a while, someone kept telling me . . . she kept asking me, like, “What did you say when you think you became a Christian?” And I would say, “I said, ‘Please come and get me.'” That just wasn’t good enough for her. Okay. You didn’t say the magic words on the magic formula? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would avoid that. I would just talk to them about their life. I’d maybe show them people who are Christian who they don’t know are Christian, for example. You know, there are Christians in every field that people don’t know are Christian, right? I think they should just watch, and then somebody that they trust, they could talk to, and then I would say . . . mostly get to know them, and then when they start asking you, us, questions, then we answer honestly, but we don’t begin to push them. I think that that’s—especially for a person who’s an intellectual, like in the university. It’s never going to work that way. And the other thing is to tell them times when you’ve been changed—I mean, I always like to say not just . . . Christianity is mostly presented socially or personally, not necessarily intellectually, right? In fact, usually not intellectually. But there are things everybody is concerned about. Everybody has sinned. There’s not a single person probably even who gets to five years old who doesn’t have something that they know they shouldn’t have done, for example. And so I might share a time when I’ve used 1 John 1:9, which I think is the most underrated scripture in the universe, where it says, “If I confess my sin,” and that word always people stumble on, but the word sin just means—it’s an archery term. It means you missed the mark. You didn’t hit the center, right? You may have missed it a little. You may have missed it a lot. So in 1 John 1:9, he says, “If I confess my sin, He’s faithful and just to forgive me and to cleanse from all unrighteousness,” and that’s the part no one pays any attention to. Okay? So I just sinned, and I can give you an example. So I had, with my partners before all this, watched pornographic movies, for example. We had watched those. Even at the University of Texas, there was something called, I think, Friday night movies or something. And so, when I came to Christ, I never had a desire to see that again, but I could be driving down the Los Angeles freeway, where you have a lot of time, and suddenly something would start flashing in my mind from one of those films unconsciously called up by me. I wasn’t calling it up. And that disturbed me. So I would say out loud in my car—usually I was alone. “Okay, Lord, You saw that and I saw it, and I confess that that’s a sin, and I ask you to forgive me, but not just to forgive me, I ask you to cleanse me from this.” And I did that for about a year, and it just totally went away. I don’t ever have those flashbacks, nothing. But we forget to ask to be cleansed. Getting rid of a sin that has become a habit is not an easy thing to do, but it’s certainly not going to be done by secular psychology, because first they’re going to rationalize that it’s not really a sin. Everybody does it, right? So Christian psychology. Real Christian psychology, biblical psychology, is as far from secular psychology as anything. I mean, I can’t even imagine a field that’s more disparate than the way we teach psychology. You know, there was a book that was famous when I was young and you probably were, too, and it was the book that everybody read about psychology, and it said, I’m okay, you’re okay. Two lies. I’m not okay, and neither are you! That is very true. If you want to believe it, go right ahead, but it was exactly the opposite, and we grew up on that. And we taught our children that and their grandchildren that. And now we have what we have. Yes. We have exactly what has been planted. Yes. It’s just like there’s no clear line between evil and good. Or evil is called good and good evil. Exactly. That’s exactly the scripture, right? Calling good evil and evil good, and that is where we are. Yes. Wow, Mary, you have had quite a life, really, it sounds like. Just full of experience and moving from Texas to California—living spirituality in California, I can’t even imagine what that might be. And then really coming to Christ in the midst of, I would say, a very, very unlikely culture and time. And I think that that’s very encouraging for us. Even, like you say, if you look at the culture now, it seems like a very unlikely place where people can find Christ, but Christ is right in the middle, waiting. So I really am so grateful for you coming and telling your story, especially I love the dream aspect. Because dreams are incredibly real and powerful when they’re more than just the ordinary. They are the extraordinary dream that you know is from God, and there’s no question. I think that the reason that God used dreams with me is that there was no other way to reach me. There really wasn’t. I mean, I had students who were praying for me, who would try to talk to me, and I wasn’t listening. And, you know, I’d be nice just because they were students, but there was no other way to reach me, I think. And that’s why the dream. I think a lot of people who are very strong atheists have had very strong experiences and rejected them. That’s probably true, based upon the research that I’ve done, even the stories that I’ve heard. Sometimes I think we think, “Oh, people in the third world countries, or maybe the Middle East, that they will experience dreams,” but the Lord provides dreams to un-reached peoples everywhere around the globe, and I was amazed. I think that was probably one of the most surprising things or parts of the research was the presence of dreams, unexpected dreams and encounters and providential circumstances, and things that were so personal and so powerful. That couldn’t be explained any other way. That are life changing in that way, too. It certainly was for you. You had a sudden pivot. For years, you know, when you first become a Christian, you are really constantly off center. Do you know what I mean? You’re searching. You kind of know that this is wrong but you don’t really know . . . . It’s hard. The Bible’s very good. I would recommend people read it and copy it or whatever, and I think especially the New Testament or the Psalms or Proverbs. Because I think we read it casually, or we read it like Bible studies. Honestly, maybe I shouldn’t say this, I’ve never really taken to most Bible studies. Because it’s like you’re working on one book for a long time, and that’s interesting. It’s intellectually interesting but not life changing. I think when you’re alone with the scripture and you’re copying it or whatever, your only partner in that is God. It’s not other people saying, “Oh, well when I read this, I thought . . . .” Yes. I’ve heard it somewhat summarized like, “You can read for information or you can read towards transformation.” Yeah. So I think that’s where you live. Like you say, you’re alone with God, and transformation happens in your heart and your mind when you open yourself up to the truths of scripture, and it’s just you and Him and there’s nowhere to hide. But that’s an attitude, too, in which you approach the word of God. What wisdom coming from you! I just want to say one other thing about . . . . Let’s say I have a friend who’s a skeptic or have a friend who’s like I was or whatever. We can’t discount just prayer that people don’t even know you’re praying for them, right? So before I had this dream, I found out later that there was a woman in the neighborhood who would go around all the time in the houses in this little block area, block and a half or something, and she would pray in front of the house. And when I got to know her later, she said, “When I got to your house one day, my feet were stuck to the ground. I could not move. I prayed the prayer, and I tried to leave, and I couldn’t leave.” And then she went into, I guess tongues or something? Anyway, she had stood there. She didn’t know how long. It was probably a half an hour or more, and she was not allowed to move. She couldn’t actually physically move. So then you find out all these people—like I found out students of mine had been praying for me for years, former students. So that can’t be ignored. Can’t be ignored. It’s extremely powerful. It is. And we don’t know how much. Sometimes you see somebody in a store, and you just think, “Lord, really help them. I don’t know what’s going on in their life, but help them.” You don’t know! But what we do know is that God answers prayers. Yes, yes. Well, that’s probably a fantastic way to end our conversation. Thank you so, so very much for sharing, not only your story but incredible insight and wisdom with us today, Mary. We really appreciate it. Thank you. It was great talking to you, Jana. Great talking to you. God bless you in your work. Thank you! Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Mary’s story. You can find out more about her and her book on worldviews, Is Reality Secular?, in the episode notes on this podcast. 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. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

Many people presume there is no God because that’s all they’ve known. The question of God seemed irrelevant. In today’s episode Daniel Rodger tells his story of moving from a culturally-informed atheism to an unwavering belief in God who completely transformed his life. Learn more about Daniel and Critical Witness: Critical Witness link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QksajfJj_o 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 try to understand why and how people either move away from or move towards God and Christianity. We want to listen to the lesser-heard B side of either nonbelief or belief, depending on what side you’re coming from. Each podcast, we’ll listen to a story from a former atheist who changed their mind and came to belief in God. They know both sides of the story. These stories might look a bit different from different parts of the world, from different parts of western culture. Today, we’ll be talking with Daniel Rodger, who lives in London, England. He’s a former atheist who came to the Christian faith against the grain of his culture. Welcome to the podcast, Daniel, it’s great to have you on the show. Thank you very much for inviting me on. Oh, good, good. As we’re getting started, can you tell me a little bit about who you are? What you do? Your life? Yeah, sure. So I have a background as a registered healthcare professional that specialized in working in the operating theatres, and for the last nearly four years, I’ve been working as an academic at a university in London, where I teach, and it also gives me the time and flexibility to research and do research into areas I’m interested in, usually related to things in bioethics, so abortion, artificial womb technology, and then some other areas kind of related to my more professional area. That sounds really quite interesting, and with the nature of culture these days, probably quite exciting at times. And that makes me think about just the context of where you are. I know, in the US, we’ve been sensing a push back against Christianity in the last few years, but in England, it’s been going on for quite a long time. Just to give me a context to your story, can you tell me a little bit about what it feels like in England in terms of Christianity and religion and those kinds of things? Sure. Yeah. I’d say, in England, it varies in different parts of the UK, I guess a little bit like the US. I’m in London, so it’s the southern part of England. And that’s kind of known—I mean, it’s not really the Bible belt, but it’d be a much smaller equivalent, more like just the buckle, and that’s sort of in the south/southeast of England. There’s more Christians than there is probably in the midlands and the north, so in my own context, there are more Christians than there are probably in other parts of the country. You wouldn’t necessarily know that, and that’s for a number of reasons. One is, I think, we learn from quite a young age that there are certain things you sort of keep to yourself, and I think people who have religious beliefs kind of know that it’s something they can talk about at home and pray and read their Bibles, but they kind of leave it at home, and they bring it with them to work or to school or wherever they find themselves. And I’d say generally the culture is apathetic, really, to religious belief. I think probably if we go back 10 years ago, a sort of high point of new atheism, it was a lot easier to have discussions about religious belief, often hostile, but it was at least easier to have those, whereas now I find, at least in my own circles, that it’s very difficult to have fruitful discussion about religion, God, Christianity more specifically. And if you do, often it doesn’t last very long because people are very uncomfortable talking about those things, really. I think that’s it, the general summary. So when you were growing up as a child, was it different than it is now? Did you have much exposure to Christianity as a child? Was your family Christian? Did you go to church? Were you exposed to it in school? What’s that like as a child? Yeah. I’d say, in terms of a sort of demographic, I come from a sort of white working class/benefits class, and the think about white working class culture is that religion plays a very, very minute part of life. You tend to find very few churches, or at least very few active churches, and where you find the most active Christian faith is in the middle class. So in my own sort of context growing up, I remember having very, very, very few discussions probably in the first 16 years of my life in regards to religion. I don’t remember ever really having any very long, serious conversations about God and none really regarding Christianity. I remember a few things. I remember being in a biology class at high school and a friend asking me if I believed in God, and I said, “I like the idea of God, but there’s no evidence of such a being,” so I didn’t have any belief. And within my own home, so single-parent household. My mother didn’t have any religious belief I was aware of. It was never discussed at home. Actually, it’s quite good to talk about things. It kind of reminds me. It triggers things. So I did have a neighbor upstairs who, at least for some period of my early childhood, would read me Bible stories, so I actually remember one. I actually remember it was a gold children’s Bible that she would bring down, and I remember one of the stories about King Solomon and the baby and threatening to tear it in two to try and identify the true mother, who the mom was. And I remember that story quite vividly, but other than that, I can’t really remember having any Christian discussion or input at all. And I think I’ve always been relatively honest. I think there could be a tendency sometimes for some Christians to look back at their own views and start seeing themselves as sort of a Christopher-Hitchens-type figure, perhaps being more hostile to it. But I was never like that. I was a hopeful atheist, you know? I would have liked the idea of there being a God. I just didn’t have any reason to think someone like that existed or that it had any relevance to my life, really. Yeah, so that’s interesting. So you had a lack of exposure, really, in your world. You had bits and pieces, I guess, just dots from your neighbor, maybe a little bit of religious education at school or something- Yeah. We had religious education as part of the curriculum. I think that’s an agreement going back over 100 years when the churches were running the schools, and so when they took that over, they’ve always had religious education in the schools in England. But I just used those classes for messing about. I don’t remember ever really listening or taking that seriously. We used to hide under the tables. I didn’t do well at school. Again, being white working class, we’re actually, in terms of educational attainment, we’re the lowest demographic in the UK. Actually, no that’s not true. There’s only one group below us, which is the Romani Travelers, but other than that, we are the lowest attaining demographic in the UK, the least likely to get the minimum 5 A to C GCSEs at school. And I didn’t attain that. I didn’t get even 5 A to C GCSEs. And my mom never finished school. She got expelled from school. Wow. And just considering what we know about you so far, that you work as an academic in a university, that makes me very curious about how you got from A to Z, but I’m sure we’ll get there. But backing up, here, when you said that you didn’t think that there was any evidence for religion or Christianity or anything like that, evidently there was something about it that seemed attractive, that you wanted to believe. You just couldn’t. Yeah. I don’t know. I failed to take too many atheists—agnostics, obviously, not so much, but atheists who don’t even want there to be a God. It just think that’s . . . I find that very difficult to believe. But I can understand not believing in God, but I find it hard to believe not wanting to believe in God. Because it changes the whole nature of existence that there is a purpose behind the universe, that there’s a purpose behind why there’s something rather than nothing, that life might have some sort of meaning that’s discoverable to make a life more satisfying to live. And that especially offers hope for people who have very little. I think it’s easy to think like that sometimes. If you have everything you need, but for the vast majority of human beings now and in the time past, that hasn’t been the case. Right. There are such huge implications for life without God, but so many seem to think that they’re perfectly content without God, and perhaps they haven’t thought through those implications that you just expressed. Again, just trying to get into your mindset, if you didn’t believe God existed, that it wasn’t viable enough for belief, what was Christianity or belief in God to you? Was it some kind of wishful thinking? Was it a fairy tale? Myth? Was it something man made up to soothe those needs that they have inside? What did you perceive it to be? Yeah. I don’t even know if I can give an answer to that, because I just didn’t give it that much thought. It was literally just very rarely entered my consciousness. I had interest. There was no one to talk to, no one talking to me about it. And so I just lived. Without really giving it much thought. And I think there’s a benefit and there’s a downside to that because I didn’t have any . . . . The criticism I had of belief in God, I just kind of absorbed from culture, through things about the degree of suffering, especially human suffering, and natural evil and things like that, so I could come up with objections, but I wasn’t really heavily invested in them in any sort of meaningful way. I would have enough to say if someone brought it up, but as I said, I think I just didn’t really care, to be honest. Yeah. I know that, as you expressed in your current context there in England, just not caring about these bigger questions. There seems to be a bit of an apathy about it. I think that’s very, very common. Yeah. It is. And it makes it difficult as a Christian now to have those conversations, because I think people do view it as a kind of . . . . It’s just not something that’s taken seriously. I think there are so many other views and perspectives that more currency and validity, and religious belief is sort of at the end of the line, really, I’d say. Right. So you didn’t care that much but you just knew it was not that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t have any good reasons to take it seriously and to see that it made any difference to anyone’s life, really. So I didn’t have any strong reasons for it, but I didn’t have anything against it as well, so it wasn’t like I was reading Nietzsche and then Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russell and things like that. I didn’t really care enough to read things like that. I wasn’t even aware of them, so it wasn’t like I was . . . . I didn’t give it any sort of intelligent thought, really, in a way, either for or against it. I wasn’t bothered. I wasn’t interested. So it’s not like. . . . As I said, going back, I wasn’t a Christopher-Hitchens-type person. I was just a normal person who didn’t care about God and had some reasons to kind of back that up but wasn’t really that invested in it. I wasn’t really invested in arguing about it for or against. I think I probably subconsciously accepted some of the conclusions that kind of follow from that, perhaps, in that I just did what I wanted to do. Captain of my own ship. And just wanted to have fun and be a bit lazy and just normal things. I don’t know. It seemed normal at the time. Sure, sure. So it was a bit of a default atheism in a way. Definitely, yeah. So I wasn’t agnostic because I could give you reasons. I didn’t think God existed. I didn’t think there were good reasons to believe in God, certainly not any persuasive ones. And no one had ever told me otherwise. Right. So you weren’t around any good reasons, any good exposure to an embodied Christianity except perhaps for that neighbor who might have introduced a moment of it, but other than that, it seems like it just wasn’t in your world. Yeah, I guess I just viewed them as stories. Even when I was being read Bible stories, they’re just. . . like finding out about the Greek myths. They’re just stories that you’re told, and I wasn’t led to believe they were historical or anything like that. They were just stories. I read my children stories at bedtime. It’s just a story at bedtime. I didn’t really give it any greater thought than that, really. They were just some interesting stories. Right. And this was a bit of your attitude until . . . . How old were you when you began to turn the page or come to a place where you were questioning your beliefs? Or what happened that made you turn the corner and become open towards God? Yeah. So when I was 19, my grandparents had become Christians about maybe five years earlier to that, and so at the time, I think I was working in a frozen warehouse at the time. And also would so some sort of gardening work for my grandparents sometimes, and so when I went ’round their house, they would often talk to me about God, especially Jesus. And we would just talk, and if I’m honest, I thought they were in a cult. I thought they were mad. And often expressed that in sort of choice, coarse language and tell them just to shut up because I just didn’t want . . . . I was just sick of every time I go in ’round there, it was like, “Oh, just stop talking about Jesus for a while. It’s doing my head in.” So that would carry on for a while. But what kind of started it. I wasn’t taking them seriously. And I would ask lots of questions, and I think, at that point, kind of looking back, it was interesting now to look back and look at some of the questions I remember asking, you know, what about different religions. “If you speak to a Muslim, they’ll feel just as strongly as you do about how right their beliefs are. They might have had religious experiences. You say you’ve had a religious experience.” So I remember asking those types of questions, and I think, going back to what we were saying earlier about rethinking about it, but looking back, I must have given it some thought in a way because I did have objections and questions, that I wasn’t ready to embrace something unless my questions had reasonable answers I think. But I definitely remember asking questions about evil in the world and suffering and different religious experiences, about the existence of different religions and they couldn’t all be true. So those types of things. So I remember asking those types of questions and thinks about sex and, well, you know, “How can God want you to be with one person forever? That sounds like madness.” All sorts of things like that, I guess, were just coming into my head at the time. And so they would try their best to kind of give me answers. Some were satisfying. Some, probably most, were not. But what it did is it sort of stoked an interest to maybe think about some of these things a little bit more. I didn’t do very well at school. I was never in a context in my home life that allowed . . . would encourage me to see any value in education, in learning, in reading. I hardly ever read books. I don’t remember having any books growing up, like reading really. So I wasn’t really in an environment where I was kind of intellectually nurtured, but I also wasn’t stupid, and so I thought that, if he’s going to keep talking about this stuff all the time, I should at least have a more informed criticism, and so it’s really at that point when I started taking those questions a bit more seriously, thinking about those bigger sort of questions, and doing a little bit of reading here and there, looking at stuff online, going to the library. So that’s interesting. You were, at first, asking questions back to your grandparents, it seems like in an objectionable way, like trying to disprove it or push back against it because they were bothering you and so you wanted to bother them back with some hard questions, but then somewhere along the way, that push back turned into interest, and then you began a more genuine pursuit of the answers. Would you say that that shift in attitude or willingness to actually investigate- I think part of it was I wanted to prove them wrong, and I think part of it was wanting to be more informed about it as well. I didn’t really have . . . my questions were valid. They’re valid questions. They’re important questions that anyone should ask. It’s not like I’d read books about that. They were just sort of things that, as I said, I’d either absorbed or was kind of thinking of objections at the time, and I think, yeah, at some point that shift kind of . . . . My approach shifted at some point from just wanting to show them wrong, to show them that they’re wrong, to thinking more openly about it. And again, I’ve never been a close-minded person. Even before I knew of G.K. Chesterton, you know, he says the purpose of an open mouth is to clamp down on something solid, just like an open mind. And so it came to a point where I actually stumbled upon a book in a library, which a lot of people I’m sure will be aware of, is The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel. And I stumbled across that book. And, let’s say you’re not being in England, how unlikely that is to happen. To come across a good Christian book in a council library is highly unlikely. I’m not saying it’s miraculous, but it’s close to being, because there are so few good Christian books around, especially in libraries. But I came across that, and I think it was at that point, I thought, “All right, well, let’s see what they’ve good,” and having a read of that. And that book was a real turning point because, although there’s valid criticism of that book and those kinds of books, it led me to Christian thinkers, which I didn’t realize was a category. It led me to read what they were saying and have people I could actually read and listen to and get a pretty comprehensive understanding of Christianity, of engaging with sort of objections that I have had, and just sort of led me to thinking about Christianity a bit more seriously. I think it was kind of after that that I realized, whether it’s weeks or months, coming to a kind of point where I sort of crossed a threshold where I think . . . I always explained it as knowing a bit too much to sweep it under the carpet. So when you were investigating . . . or you saw this book by Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith. That’s definitely Christian oriented. Did you take a look at other world religions? Did you compare them? Did you want to see if Christianity held a candle to any of these other world religions, like Muslims, like you said, that they’re very strong in their belief, or others? How did you narrow it down to Christianity as the one that you were willing to pursue? Yeah. That’s a good question. I remember thinking at the time that I could probably rule out quite a significant number of them, especially those like Hinduism, where reincarnation suggests I would get another chance, exploring in the future, so I kind of focused on the Abrahamic faiths because these seemed like the ones that, although the Jewish faith is quite small, at least Islam and Christianity have a significant proportion of the population as their alleged adherence, and so Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, especially those faiths, come with a sort of finality after death. They seemed like the ones that should be taken most seriously, so I specifically focused on thinking about and reading about the three different Abrahamic faiths. And then, once I guess you settled in on monotheism and then you looked at those side by side, and what made Christianity more persuasive as an ideology or a worldview or that you came to a place where you settled on that? Yeah. I think, in terms of reading The Case for Faith and reading some other books and reading some things online. I’d say the point in which I guess it took a foothold is when I starting reading the Bible. It was the person of Jesus, reading the gospels, and God, looking back, speak to me through the gospels, and so I’d say that was the thing that really . . . the distinguishing factor between the three was Jesus, I would say. In terms of what He had to offer with grace and salvation? Or did it have anything to do with his resurrection or the viability of that? Or a combination of everything? Yeah. I mean it’s what he said. It spoke to me. The resurrection, I think, especially after reading The Case for Faith and reading stuff around . . . William Lane Craig and other scholars. The resurrection I found incredibly persuasive, and I didn’t know . . . . It was much stronger. Like I kind of thought the resurrection would have, in terms of historicity and stuff, the strength for those claims would be relatively weak, and they were much stronger than I anticipated. So I think the resurrection has been a great source of hope and strength, and it’s sort of helped me to continue on that path for the last decade. So yeah, I think the resurrection was really key in that. So, at the end of the day, you came to a place where you were able to realize or appreciate the fact that Christianity is more than just a story, more than just a Bible story, that there’s some kind of historical grounding to these events that are in the Bible? Yeah, yeah. I think the more I read . . . . It was a combination of things. I think first I had to . . . kind of looking back on my journey. First, I had to see that it was perfectly reasonable to believe that God existed. So that was the first stumbling block. I remember thinking, “Okay, well maybe you don’t have to be such a dummy to think that God exists,” as a first stumbling block. I’d sort of got over that. And then it was looking more at the specific claims of the main religions, and I think the one that speak most persuasively to me, especially at the time, was the gospel. How it considered the human condition, my own experience of the impact of sin and hope and love and resurrection. Those sort of biblical themes spoke so persuasively to me compared to the alternate claims of other religions of just where Moses left off and the claims made by Mohammad in the Koran. And so it was a mixture, I’d say, of the rational but also the experience as well. I did have later a religious experience of sorts that I think probably pushed me over the line. So, Daniel, what you’re telling me is that I hear that it seemed to be a rationally historically based kind of religion that seemed to really speak existentially also to your human condition. There was something in it that drew you. You could see yourself in it with sin, yet hope and love and grace and renewal through the resurrection. But you also speak of a spiritual experience. Can you tell me about that? Sure. This is why, I think, the gospel is such good news and so transformative, especially to people who feel that they are insignificant, that they feel they have nothing really to offer, that no one really cares about them beyond sort of immediate family. What the gospel is saying is that, insignificant as we are, as small as we are in the universe, that someone created the whole universe and loved you enough to enter it. To live among you, to enter into the world, the human world. And there’s something beautiful about that to people who feel like they’re insignificant, and I think that spoke to me in a way as well, sort of existentially. But it was also the rational aspect as well, especially in regard to the resurrection, and I think the final part of that journey was . . . . I remember just reading the gospels and just feeling utterly convicted of my own sin, of knowing that I needed forgiveness and knowing where the source of that forgiveness could be found. And just knowing that I had to repent and that, if I asked God for forgiveness, that I would receive it, and I remember . . . . No shining lights or noises but just a real experience of the depth of my sin but also the depth of God’s love for me at the same time. And I haven’t had anything like it since, but it’s always stayed with me. I bet that was, in a sense . . . . It sounds like such a marker, but it sounds like it was just a bit overwhelming but in a good way. Yeah, yeah. It’s a unique experience, and I think . . . I could be more skeptical because, as I said, people from other religions have experiences, and I think I’ll be more . . . . Looking back perhaps, I could be skeptical of just that experience, but it wasn’t just the experience. It was different things. It was the experience plus reason and a rational case for God. It was the experience plus Jesus in the gospels and knowing that what he was saying is true and how it makes sense of the things I already know. It makes sense of the universe. It makes sense of my moral intuitions, my knowledge of certain things of right and wrong objectively. Suffering is evil. Something that shouldn’t be welcome. That pain is bad. That there’s beauty. You look out at a sunset or a mountain range. There’s no reason to have a sense of awe from that. And there’s all sorts of things. I think there are certain things as human beings that we know, and I think any worldview has to be able to provide good answers to what we already know, and I think Christianity does that. Yes, it seems that the Christian worldview, in your mind and for you and for your life, and really I would presume that you would say for all of humanity it makes the most sense of reality, of what we know about the universe, what we know about ourselves and our own human condition and about our loves and our longings, all of those things that you spoke of. Our ability to understand right from wrong. How long ago was it that you became a Christian? So it was about 15 years ago now. So I’m 35, and I was 20 when I started following Christ. Well, tell me about that. Tell me about how your life has been affected and changed. You used the word transformed. How has your life been transformed in moving from atheism to Christianity? Yeah. In a lot of significant ways. I think certain people . . . . There’s only actually very few people that I’m still in contact today who knew me before I was a Christian for various reasons, and I remember one of them saying, of all the people they knew who have become a Christian, I would be last on their list. And he meant that quite genuinely. Yes, I bet they were surprised. Yeah. Just a little bit. And so I mean it was definitely difficult to begin with. Just basic things. I mean, I didn’t know what to do. Before I started attending church as a Christian, I’d never been to a church really, other than maybe . . . I don’t even remember going for a wedding. I don’t really ever remember going to a church. I remember going to a synagogue and a mosque when we were at school, but I don’t really remember . . . I definitely never went to a church service before being a Christian. I didn’t know what to do. It was a whole different culture, different language that Christians can speak. You know, their own in-group language. And I didn’t really know what to do with my life. I remember being at the church where I was part of, that a lot of them worked in healthcare, and so I decided that—well, probably led in some way—that going back to school and getting some qualifications and maybe training to be some kind of healthcare professional might be a good thing to do. And so I went back to college. I worked night shifts, and then in the morning, I went to college during the day. And at the time, there was some family situation that meant it was very difficult—when you first convert, you’re quite zealous in a way that doesn’t necessarily consider . . . inconsiderate zealousness, I would say. And I think I annoyed quite a few people with that sort of early zealousness, and I regret some of the things I said and did at that point. Not intending to break relationships and things, but you know, just silly things. Listening to Christian sermons loud in the evening when my mum was trying to watch TV and just not really . . . I didn’t think . . . and other things as well. I basically ended up—it became uncomfortable and no longer possible to live at home, so I moved in with a guy from church, and I lived on his floor, so I would basically work night shifts, go to college during the day, and then go and stay at my friend’s house, and I did that for about a year. I basically got all the qualifications that I needed to go back to try and get into university, but before as well I said, growing up, not someone who’s stupid but just didn’t . . . I was never really nurtured. My mind was never really nurtured in a way. And so I think God just gave me a love for learning, especially reading, and I just started reading. And I’ve never stopped. I just read all the time. I just read, read, read, read, read. Also trying to catch up. I’d missed so much. I didn’t listen at school. My English was pretty rubbish. I didn’t know how to write an essay. I was not a blank slate, but I was a poorly developed slate. Damaged. And God really used books to change that, and I’m still learning today, but reading stuff like Christian apologetics and philosophy and reading the Bible of course, reading a lot of the Bible, just shaped my mind. Renewed. My mind was renewed. And I don’t want to waste that. And so I went to university, got my qualifications, and I’ve just kind of been studying and working and doing things since then.  Also things as well . . . . I never wanted to get married. Everyone in my family was either a single parent or had been married multiple times, so obviously there was some misunderstanding of the nature of marriage, and I was fortunate. At university, I met my wife, and we’re married with three children today. That sounds like quite a transformation. And I guess, if you’re teaching at the university level, then you must have pursued graduate level education yourself. Is that right? Yeah. So I’m fortunate that, in the UK, if you’re a healthcare professional, if you go to an academic post, very, very few people will have their clinical expertise and also a doctorate, and so usually the minimum requirement to get an academic job as a healthcare professional is to have a master’s degree plus you usually have to have five years clinical experience as well. So I have a master’s degree from Heythrop College, University of London, in contemporary ethics, and since then I’ve done a graduate teaching course as well and some other small things, but yeah. I don’t have a doctorate, but they tend to encourage you to get one at some point, which I’ll probably do at some point, but because I’ve got three young children, I don’t want to take on too much that will affect me and being a rubbish husband and a rubbish dad. Understandable. So you obviously love to learn but you love for others to learn as well. I understand you have a YouTube channel. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah. So I think during lockdown due to COVID-19, it was difficult to maintain normal relationships with people, and so a friend of mine who’s a pastor at a church in Guilford, a good friend of mine, we sort of decided maybe to start up a podcast, and we like speaking to interesting people, and having a podcast is a great way to get interesting people and get to chat with them for an hour or two. And that’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple of months now. I think we’ve interviewed about seven people. We’ve got another one coming out tomorrow. And it’s just great. It just means that we can contact interesting people and just get to chat with them, ask them questions, and get to know them a bit better. It’s called Critical Witness on YouTube. And it’s great. I’m enjoying it. I look forward to having you on there at some point. Excellent, excellent. Yeah, I’ve watched your YouTube channel, and the content is excellent. It’s stellar. Very substantive content, so I would advise anyone who’s listening to take a look at that. Before we wrap up our conversation—your story has been amazing—what would you like to say to those listening to this podcast who are skeptical about God and Christianity, perhaps those who’ve just presumed that atheism is right just because of what they’ve heard, like you were once? Or like you once did? Yeah. If you have a Christian friend . . . . I mean, that’s half the problem sometimes. I would imagine I had friends who were Christians. I just never knew. So one thing, as Christians, is to speak to non-Christian friends, and also if you’re a skeptic, if you have a Christian friend that you know is a Christian, speak to them. If you’ve got some objections and questions, go straight to them. Ask them. Maybe they’ve got some recommendations. Podcasts to listen to. Videos on YouTube. There’s so many resources available now that weren’t available 15 years ago, really, and it’s amazing content. So that would be something. Another thing is I also encourage skeptics to read the Bible as well. I think that Christians, especially those who have an interest in philosophy and apologetics, can often be so quick to go to a book. Read Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig or read a John Lennox book or something like that, but actually just reading the Bible . . . . God can speak to you through the Bible. He’s been doing that for over 2,000 years now. And so I would strongly recommend that skeptics read the Bible. Wherever you speak, but I think I remember starting from Genesis for a bit but also just reading the gospels, getting to know Jesus through an unfiltered lens. I think that’s important. Yeah, an unfiltered lens, I think, is a good idea. I think there are so many ideas about what the Bible is without having read it. But for those who aren’t familiar with the gospels, where could someone find those in the Bible? Yeah. So there’s New Testament . . . I think the one I’ve always enjoyed reading is the Gospel of Luke. Luke was a physician, historian, and his gospel is written specifically for people don’t necessarily have a religious background, contrary to something like Matthew. Matthew is a great, great gospel but specifically written for people of a Jewish background, so I think starting from Luke . . . . Luke and Acts, I think, are always places I love to recommend people going to. Yeah, I think that’s good advice. And on the flip side, what would you say, in this culture where there’s an increasing push back against Christians and Christian beliefs, what would you like to say to Christians today, if anything? Yeah, it’s difficult. And this is probably one of the questions where I might be the least helpful person. Especially as someone who’s in academia, and it’s a very difficult place to be a Christian. I’m not sure I have many good answers. I’m a natural pessimist by nature, a redeemed pessimist, and so I . . . I think Christians need to read the Bible more. I think reading the Bible more. Definitely I need to read my Bible more. I think Christians need to read their Bibles more. I think we need to just get in a habit of speaking to people who aren’t Christians, forming that sort of habit of making it more natural to talk about how great the gospel is, how amazing Christ is, and that there are good reasons to be a Christian. I think those sort of things can make a small difference, I think especially as I said, in the UK. A lot of the US has different places, different cultures. I think just Christians need to have a habit of speaking about their faith more and not giving in to popular expectations to just keep everything at home and keep faith locked away. As soon as you step outside the door to work, school, wherever you’re going, playing football, whatever you’re doing, to find ways of showing people that Christianity shapes who you are and everything you do. Because I think one of the most common but pernicious ideas about Christianity and belief in God in general, is that it doesn’t have any relevance. It doesn’t change anything. I think people think, “Okay, you might believe that. You believe God exists. You believe Christ died for your sins, but what does that actually change?” And I think it’s so important to show people, actually, it changes everything. And I think something I get frustrated about sometimes is . . . . People see me as I am today, so on paper, you think, “Okay, he’s married for 10 years. He’s got three children. He’s got some degrees. He’s working as an academic. He’s published academic papers.” And things like that. And people can make assumptions about me, about my life story, about my background, about how I grew up, and most of them would be false, because what they see now is someone who’s been transformed by the love of God. But they don’t see that. They just see me as I am now. Whereas my whole life is . . . . Everything I have is but for the grace of God. Yeah. It is amazing how we are so quick to presume and to make judgment without really taking the time to enter in to someone else’s life story. And I think your advice is really timely and necessary at this moment, when we’re so, like you say, kind of at the very beginning, when you talked about, in England, that religion is private. And we all have a tendency to kind of close our doors and keep our lives to ourselves and especially in this day of distraction and technology, during COVID, it seems like everything is just amplified, but as you are telling us, I think it is very wise and judicious to just take the time to get to know someone, whether they are pushing back against belief about God or whether they have a very strong belief in God. You don’t know their story, and you don’t know the reasons, why they are, what they believe, who they are, all of these things. And it would be good if we just took time to listen to the other side, and that’s kind of the point of this podcast, and I hope that those who are listening really have listened to you. Because you are a life that has been transformed, and it’s, for me, a really beautiful thing. So I want to thank you, Daniel, for coming on and for sharing your story with us. Is there anything else you want to add to your story before we close? No. I think it’s been interesting. It’s been cathartic, sort of, talking about it, and yeah, I just really appreciate you having me on and wish you all the best for your future interviews. Fantastic. Thank you again, Daniel. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this new podcast with your friends and social network. I would appreciate it. Again, to hear more from Daniel, take a look at his YouTube channel called Critical Witness. I think you’ll find it well worth your time as he and his guests think through issues of culture, apologetics, theology, and evangelism. For questions and feedback about this episode with Daniel, 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 listen to the other side.  

A Jewish atheist, Nikki wanted nothing to do with Jesus until an unexpected spiritual experience caused her to question all she believed as real and true. Follow The Side B Instagram: @thesidebpodcast Twitter: @thesidebpodcast Facebook: www.facebook.com/thesidebpodcast 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 understand how someone flips the record of their life from atheism to Christianity. Each podcast, we listen to the story of someone who was an atheist and became a Christian. Each journey is unique, filled with unusual twists and turns. The story we’re going to listen to today certainly does not disappoint. It is as fascinating as anything you might imagine seeing, reading, or hearing about. Nikki contacted me after hearing my interview on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? Podcast and told me her incredible story. I thought it was too good not to share. As a Jew who didn’t believe in God, who lived and immersed herself in an anti-God, very intellectual culture, Nikki was highly resistant to religious belief, particularly to Jesus, someone whom she adamantly did not believe in, nor anyone she ever wanted to believe in. But she experienced an unexpected profound spiritual encounter with Jesus, that she immediately became open to the possibility that perhaps God existed after all, and that His name was Jesus. As someone who valued reason, Nikki set out on a diligent intellectual search to find out what was actually true, whether or not a reality outside of the natural world actually exists and that the person she met, Jesus, actually had good reason to exist based upon more than just her personal experience. I hope you’ll come and listen to her extraordinary story with me. Well, thanks for joining us at the Side B Podcast, Nikki. It’s so great to have you here today. Thank you. Thank you. Well, as we’re getting started, so the listeners know a little bit about who you are, why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself? So my name is Nikki, and I live in Portland, Oregon. I work as a pastor’s assistant at a local church, and I’ve lived in Portland since 2005, but I’m originally from the South. Originally from the South? Oh, okay. Yeah, I don’t hear a real strong Southern dialect. As someone from Atlanta, I can tell you’ve not lived here for a while. So, why don’t you take us back to the beginning, your childhood, and let us know kind of where you grew up. What was it like there? Did you live in the Bible Belt? Did you live in southern America. Tell us what that world was like. Was there any sense of God in it in your world? So yeah, I grew up in Houston. We moved there when I was four years old. And I knew that we were… I’m Jewish by birth, so we were the only Jewish family in the whole neighborhood. I was often the only Jewish kid at school, but we were unique in that my parents did not believe in God. They were atheists, and that’s how they raised me. But we would still go to synagogue. But my first encounter with Jesus was when I was seven years old. We were on the school bus, and I was about to get off the school bus, and I was going down the stairs, and this little girl came up to me, and she had this angry look on her face. She was actually a friend of mine, and she just yelled in my face, “You killed Jesus!” and she shoved me down the bus stairs. So I laid there stunned. I went home with tears, and I had to ask my parents. “Who’s Jesus? And why did I kill him? I don’t remember killing anyone.” So it was at that point that I heard about Jesus and was told that He was a rabbi and that he’s not the Messiah but most of the people that we live around believe that he’s, like, a savior. “But that’s not for us. Jesus is for the Christians, and we have nothing to do with them. Yeah. So that was your introduction to Jesus? Yeah. So I would imagine… Did that make you feel like an outsider with regard to your culture? Was that girl… unfortunately, was she representative of most of the people around you? Did you live around a lot of Christians? Did you ever experience any kind of Christianity apart from the girl who shoved you down the bus stairs? They were just my neighbors, so I didn’t know any different, but I knew that we were different, that the teachings about Jesus were that… That was for the goy. That was for everyone else. I didn’t understand because I was told there wasn’t a God. And we were going to synagogue, and my dad acted like he was God but he hated God. So there wasn’t any God. We still went to synagogue. It was all very confusing. And then, every year, my brother and I would do a Hanukkah presentation, and my mom would make latkes, the potato pancakes, and bring them to school, and I’d have to do this presentation and educate all the Christians about Hanukkah. So it was kind of weird growing up in the Bible Belt as just, like, the one Jew, but apparently actually Houston has a large Jewish population, but we were not a part of it. So I was kind of isolated, and I didn’t really understand religion. It didn’t make any sense to me. I would go to Hebrew school and learn Hebrew. I would go to synagogue and kind of say these prayers that were transliteration and not in English. They were just… they had absolutely no meaning to me. I liked being in synagogue because there was a sense of community and I kind of felt self, especially when you’re in a culture that is different than yours. And then you have this one little group, so I liked that, but it didn’t have a… I’d hear other people talk about their faith and what faith should be, and that wasn’t my experience, so I kind of didn’t like the whole religion thing. I would go with my friends to Mass sometimes, and there was a sense of peace there that I didn’t understand, but I knew it wasn’t for me. That’s what I’d been told. It was… Christianity and this whole Jesus thing really wasn’t for me. So that’s all I knew about it. So as you were growing up, that must have been a bit confusing, participating in religious ritual and services but not believing in a sense. That it was more, I guess, community and part of your ethnicity. Part of your community in a sense, but not believing. Yeah. It was just tradition. It was something that we did, and especially coming out of World War II, there was a strong sense of, you know, “We’re going to stick together as Jews. We’ve just come through this horrible experience. We’ve lost a lot of our families, and so you kind of have an obligation to be Jewish, even if you don’t believe that there is a God or even if you want to be a Buddhist. You still have to be Jewish first. That is your identity. Even though it doesn’t make any sense. That’s your identity. You can be an atheist Jew. The Judaism itself is your identity.” But I didn’t understand. It was unmoored from anything scriptural. I didn’t really understand that part. We did do the feasts. We did do Passover. We did do… Well, Hanukkah’s not really technically a kingdom feast, but we did do that, so there was kind of a semblance of community and culturalism, but it wasn’t connected to who I now know God is, so it was really empty and devoid, and I saw that in the lives of Christians around me, too. So I was told that science was the answer, rationality was the answer, and everything is observable, and reality is no more than what we can see and experience and observe. So that took the place of my God, and that’s what I pursued. I was always just interested in knowing what was true. So that’s how I grew up. I also was pretty ill growing up. I was born prematurely, and so I had a vestibular issue which… I would have severe attacks at least four times a year, and they were hell. I mean I’ve had it all my life until recently, so growing up with that and not having a God was particularly challenging. And I was told that I wasn’t sick. Because it was a dizziness thing, so there was no treatment, and my parents really didn’t know what to do about it, and so I grew up with like a sense of a moral weakness. I know that sounds funny from an atheist perspective, but because I wasn’t able to function, there was something wrong with me. I was morally weak because I couldn’t quite hold a job after graduate school, and so it was all… Growing up was a little bit challenging compared to a lot of people. Okay. Wow. It does sound like you grew up with some challenges for sure, in terms of trying to navigate your way. Very admirably, though, in terms of really your pursuit of what you believed to be true, whether it was science, rationality, so obviously then you believed that religion was not rational, not true in any sense. So talk with me about, as you were growing up, obviously, through high school, college, graduate school, you were moving through this period of your life, doing life on your own, but what did you perceive religion to be if it wasn’t true or rational? Religion was an opiate for the masses. It was a crutch for the weak. It was something that people hung their hat on when there was nothing else to hang their hat on. They were uncomfortable with ambiguity. Of course, I… In my intellect, I was so superior because I was okay with not knowing. Belief had nothing to do with truth. I mean that never entered my mind, that belief could have anything to do with truth. At least a faith belief would not have anything to do with truth, so I never… I just saw it as patently untrue. I would hear the bible stories of, like, a talking donkey, and I would just laugh. I worked in a children’s bookstore at one point, and they had the creationist books, and I would be on the floor laughing. I would mock and deride it. I really did. Anyone who believed in any sort of God was… I thought that they were really dumb, although I met some smart people. The Jews were smart because they had been… I guess it was genetic or something, so there was that sense of Jewish exceptionalism and superiority, which is no more than pride, but that’s what I grew up. The term “chosen people” that were chosen by God. I thought that was silly. But I couldn’t see how any of it could be true, and I didn’t understand why otherwise smart people would believe in it, other than it gave them a sense of comfort and ability to deal with the unknown in a way that kind of structured their anxiety. I just thought, in the end, it was a mental illness. I really did. I thought that belief in God was delusional and that some day science would come along and cure humanity of all of this insanity. So that’s the way I looked at religion and belief. No, yes, in a very… I mean, according to your own worldview, that makes perfect sense. So as you were again embracing your atheism as the rational way of thinking about the world, did you… I know you were dealing with your vestibular issues of illness and frailty on your own part but weren’t able to do that, like you say, with the comfort of a God, but within your own atheistic worldview, did you look at the logical implications of your atheism, in terms of what it meant for your life practically speaking, in terms of…. whether it’s meaning or purpose or human value or freedom to choose or your own consciousness and those kinds of things? Did you reflect on what atheism meant for you and your life in terms of its logical implications? Not in an ultimate sense. I never really looked at the logical presuppositions of my blind faith in atheism, but I would say that… The farthest I ever got was that I was just going to be comfortable with the ambiguities, that I was just made in that way. I wasn’t weak. So it was really more of a superiority thing that I took comfort in. As far as the logical endgame of reconciling that… how I reconciled that there was meaning and purpose clearly, but ultimately there wasn’t. No. I didn’t think about it had to be logically consistent all the way through to be true, but I just… It was about really self sufficiency, and so ultimately, it didn’t have to have meaning and purpose as long as it had meaning and purpose in the here and now, and then, of course, when you die, you’ll return to dust, and it all goes back. So that’s as far as I ever got. I didn’t need to have anything beyond that. It was just observable and provable. That was what made it comfortable for me. But I never got into more the deep philosophical things, and when I would have those conversations, they were… I think I would just mock them and laugh at the people who wanted to push beyond that. So you had quite a resolute understanding of the world, of your own atheism. It just seems very pragmatic. It seems like this is the way the world was. Did you feel… It sounds like you had some intellectual superiority with that, some sense of existential satisfaction that you were where you should be as a rational thinking person. Yes. Did you live among a community of atheists? Or was this… You said that you live in Portland. You moved from the South to the Northwest, where I presume that atheism is a bit more normal way of thinking about things. Can you talk about the change of culture for you as you pursued your life as an adult as an atheist? Yeah. One of the reasons we chose Portland is because it was one of the most well-read towns, and I was such a reader. And so I liked being around people that were people of ideas and liked to have deep discussions and were thoughtful about things. So when I moved here, people had all different types of belief, and so finally I got to the point where I realized that not all of them could be true but if we’re making up our own idea of what’s out there maybe some of us are wrong. That kind of occurred to me, but it didn’t really… it was like, well, how do we ever know which one is right, and so we’re just going to make up what we think is objectively true. But I was never really challenged on that. But it was comfortable to me to be around people who had thoughts. Thoughts were really interesting, and so I was very comfortable here. Escaping the Bible Belt seemed like… very fundamental and very restricting to me as a self-identified intellectual atheist, when I was being told I was just wrong all the time. It was very freeing to move to the Pacific Northwest. But I got to a point where my health struggles were getting worse. I’ve always had severe anxiety and depression, and as my health got worse and worse, I did reach out for help, and I began to have my beliefs challenged in a way because truth became very important. Truth, like knowing what was true, what was actually true, became central to my life at that point. If you’re going to be honest, if that’s a characteristic in your life that you want to pursue, honesty, then you have to know what truth is in order to tell it. And so I got to the point where I was told, “You have to choose a higher power,” and well, as an atheist, that’s a really challenging thing, right? So how do you choose something that’s higher than you? Well, I knew truth as higher than me, so put, on the altar of my life, truth. And then I also knew that energy was true, right? Because we can see it. There’s light bulbs. And then love must be true. So those three things I kind of lifted up to a higher power and began to deify those characteristics. And that’s probably when that door opened for me, that I just really wanted to know what was true in order to speak it. Because I wanted to have integrity in my life. So that was the first step that I took. But it wasn’t like God. I mean I never thought that God was a person or anything like that. That was- Yeah. But there was something in you that became open to another perspective or perhaps another view of reality or, like you say, the pursuit of truth above all else. And that’s very admirable. Sometimes that’s very difficult to do. I’m curious, during this time where you were becoming a little bit more open, did you meet any Christians or anyone of faith that tried to tell you, “Oh, I know a higher power.” Yes, I did. And her name is Mary. She’s my little angel. I came in one day, just shaking, and she grabbed onto my hand and has not let go. We called her “Bible-thumping Mary,” and here’s this atheist and this Bible thumper, and we became friends. There’s just like a similar spirit that we had. Because we can spot each other even if we’re in a different field, like the wrong field. But she would just… She told me about Jesus, and she said her pastor was Jewish. I would roll my eyes at her and think, “Lady, you’re crazy, because pastors aren’t Jewish.” But she said, “No, no. Jesus was a Jew.” I’m like, “Well, yeah, I knew that,” but towards the end I really thought that Jesus was fictional. There was a DVD that had been passed around in Portland on the streets called Zeitgeist, and it posited that Jesus was probably made up. Or He was just kind of an embodiment of all these other different mythical gods or real gods or… I don’t know. But in the end, I really believed that Jesus was probably fictional, probably completely fictional, and so when Mary started talking to me about her Jesus and how much she loved him, I thought, “Oh, my gosh! This lady is nuts. But I really like her.” But she would tell me she’s praying for me, and she’s got her church praying for me, and I didn’t know what to make of that. I would just tell her, “Please don’t. Please don’t pray for me. That’s dumb.” But she was… The things she would say were true, like morally true, emotionally true, and I didn’t know what to do with that. That was really challenging. And I was meeting more and more Christians who were like… They seemed really solid, and they didn’t seem crazy, and they were talking about Jesus. I still couldn’t go there. I was not having any of it. So I did meet some, and that wasn’t… That didn’t move me very much, other than to just kind of put things in me that said, “Okay, maybe they’re not completely nuts. Maybe there’s a truth in there somewhere. Maybe Jesus had some really good teachings,” and that’s as far as I got with that. Well, but I suppose what Mary did for you is to break down some kind of stereotype about who you thought Christians were and that perhaps they’re not as strange or irrational or whatever it is you had in your mind. “They’re not as bad as I thought they were,” perhaps. Yeah. When you get desperate enough, like… So Mary is a very salt-of-the-earth person, not intellectual at all, but God had… I didn’t know it was God, but my heart was open. Love was a very important virtue to me because I needed that connection. I didn’t have a really good family that I had connection with, and as I had been ill for 13 years at that point, off and on on my deathbed. I had been just, like, slowly dying, and so my friends had fallen away, and so I needed that connection, and you know when it’s real. On a human level, you know when it’s real. So that’s what I was craving. All the intellectual stuff, it didn’t matter at that point. So I think that’s what happened. I hit a point where I was so desperate in my life that I was just going to choose good people, and Mary was good. And she was loving, and she showed up, and that’s what spoke to me. So I would try to engage her, like, “Well, it can’t be true.” She couldn’t follow what I was saying. She didn’t want to talk about quantum physics. So we just had a relationship that wasn’t based on all the intellectual stuff that I would put up that I would have with my other friends, and my other friends just had kind of disappeared when I had been sick. They were in it for just the discussions, and when my IQ started dropping because of the vestibular issue… I mean, in the end, it was down to 85, a functional IQ of 85. I wasn’t discussing a lot of quantum physics. I wasn’t discussing the nature of the universe and reality a whole lot. I was just lying in bed, being sick, and so I needed someone like Mary to just kind of love me. And that’s really what spoke. That’s what did it. I imagine that was very powerful. Yeah. But again I suppose the issue of truth – even though you weren’t able to speak to Mary so much about quantum physics or the hard questions, she softened you in that way – but what happened, though, in terms of… you still had a desire to know what was true. Talk to us a little bit about what happened next in your journey. So yeah, I was sick. So I still had the vestibular thing. I was diagnosed with MS, I think in 2008, and then in the summer of 2017, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and so I was put in the hospital, and it was strange. I had this sense of peace that I’d never had, and Mary visited me every day. She continued to tell me about her Jewish pastor, and she brought me this Bible, and she said her pastor wanted me to have it because it was written by a bunch of Jews, and I’m like, “Okay, lady, I’ll take it,” because I didn’t want to upset her. Here I am dying, and in the hospital, they did another MRI, and they said that I didn’t have MS, which was… I had never heard of anyone just having MS and then all of a sudden not having it, and they did a contrast CT scan. They diagnosed me with pancreatic cancer based on the lab work, and then the next day, they go in to biopsy it, and there’s nothing there. I didn’t know what to think of that. They discharged me from the hospital, and I didn’t know that that had been the case, so ten days later, when I still don’t get the results and I still think I have pancreatic cancer, Mary says, “You probably need to call them to find out.” I called the doctor, and I said, “So what are the results?” They said, “Oh, we didn’t find anything.” I said, “Oh, good! So the biopsy was negative?” And they said, “No, there wasn’t anything there.” And that really shocked me because I’d seen the picture of the contrast CT scan, and there was something there. I said, “But there was a lump.” They said, “Yeah, but it wasn’t there when we went in.” And I didn’t really think about that was a miracle or anything. I just thought, “I don’t have pancreatic cancer. Yay,” move on to the next thing. But the thing was I was still declining. I was having transitory paralysis. My IQ was dropping. I wasn’t able to function. Things I could do before were just not available. My intellect was being taken away, and so in November, November 11, 2017, I go to bed, and I have an encounter with the Lord. But, you know, had I wanted a god, the last god I would have been chosen would have been Jesus, so I know it’s the Lord. There’s a golden light. He gave me the symbol of the cross. I could see that. So it would be unmistakable. He was singing over me, and this word “shekhinah” kept on ringing through my head. I wake up… So I had been asleep, and I had woken up and had seen the Lord. And then the next morning, when I get up out of bed, I don’t need the walker anymore. The word shekhinah’s running through my head, and out of my mouth comes words that sound like scripture, and I don’t know what to make of this. So I had this experience. I call Mary. I said, “Maybe you should take me to church. Maybe I should thank Jesus. I think it was Him.” But I still… Even though I had that experience, I’m like, “I could be crazy,” so I have to do the investigation, right? So if I ascribe to the scientific method, if I think scientifically, I have to put this to the test, and so I went through a very rigorous period of looking at science, looking at the history, looking at the textual criticism, talking to people, looking at things that I’d never looked at. The Lord was giving me logic proofs. I’d never studied logic. I never studied these things, but they were coming in whole. There were things that I knew that there was no way I could have known because I’d never studied them. I never formally studied logic or philosophy, and yet He was giving me things that there’s no way I could have known unless it was Him. It’s kind of like I had a library card to the universe. And I used it. I did, I did! I would just ask these questions. And in the beginning I didn’t know who to ask them to. I said it was the universe, and then I knew it was the Lord at some point. But even as I went through the investigation and the science and into history, there was a majority part of me that did not want Jesus to be true. I didn’t want it to be true. Because then there are certain implications. At the same time, though, I was attending church, and I was worshiping, and I was studying scripture, hard. I was studying the Torah. I was reading the New Testament, and the Lord was putting it all together. I knew things that… pretty advanced theological concepts were just like I knew them, and I didn’t have any explanation for that. People were seeing the writings I was… the Lord had given me. They were coming to the Lord. Ex pastors, atheists. I mean, it was just kind of crazy, and I liked Christianity because it just opened up the world. It gave it color. It gave it dimension, and the world began to make sense. When you see truth, things come in line, and I really like that. My political views the day I went to bed had been very, very liberal. I do live in a… Well, you guys know Portland. You’ve heard of it. It’s a very liberal town. The morning I woke up, my views had changed. I became a political conservative overnight. Never wanted that to happen. So what the Lord did with me was extremely dramatic, and I don’t even… There are some times I just don’t have words to put it into context. It’s just a miracle. So that’s how I got to Christianity. I had to have the Lord blast my eyes open, give me scripture supernaturally, and then I had to do the rigorous research, and then I came to see that it was true. What an extraordinary story! A very supernatural story, it sounds like, in many ways. So you came to believe that it was true, but there’s a difference between just belief that something is true and actually willing to give your life to a person who is truth. Yes. So you obviously made that step towards an embodied belief, almost. Yes, exactly. But that took a while. He had opened my eyes and put the questions to seek out in my heart and gave me that spirit of inquiry, and it was progressive after that. It wasn’t a very clear vision of Jesus in the beginning. It was more conceptual, and the embodiment, like seeing Him as a person, it took time. It’s only been three years, but it took time for Him to come out of the scripture into 3D form as My Beloved. Yeah. That was not immediate, but the eye opening was, and the Lord just removed whatever was blinding me. And I truly believe that the reason that that was possible was because I had truly been seeking truth. I truly wanted to know what was true. But more than that, I needed something more, and it was the morality of truth that I needed. Because I wanted to be a person of integrity who spoke truth, not just an intellectual knowledge of it, but a heart knowledge of truth, which is different. Those are qualitatively different. Yes, and it strikes me, as you’re telling your story, that the three values that you honored or were pursuing the most before you met Jesus were truth, energy, and love, and it’s not lost on me that the person of Christ came, you said, in golden rays of light, which is extraordinary energy, but yet He is the personification of both truth and love. So He came as, again, the person, the embodiment of all of those things which you had valued but you had no place to put them. But then you found them in the person of Christ, and it sounds like He’s just completely transformed you, so that you are actually experiencing and knowing those things, knowing them intellectually but experiencing them in your life and in your heart. I’m curious about two things, really. One is how has your life changed? And secondly, now that you still live in Portland, Oregon, in a place that now you find yourself as an outsider again in a different way, describe for us what that is like. Well, I’m not in my deathbed anymore. Praise the Lord. And just like the disciples, after He had communion, they’re like, “Where are we going to go, Lord?” Where am I going to go? I had to find something to do. So I started working at a church. I didn’t have any income when I started. They didn’t pay me for two years, but praise the Lord, He’s been faithful, and this year I started earning a salary. So I started doing that. I started working again after not having worked since 1999 because I had been so sick. There’s some sadness, of course, but the Lord says that those who are not willing to leave house and father and mother are not worthy of Me. And so my husband did leave. My family, most of them do not talk to me because they know that I’m a follower of Yeshua, so that’s been… I’ve largely done this alone. My son, as I raised as a very good atheist. He will not talk to me. So there are these things that the Lord tells us about, and truth is truth. He is the embodiment of truth. He is my beloved. I’m going to follow Him. And yeah, there are sacrifices, but He sacrificed Himself for us, and I don’t get to make up truth and change that. I have to follow it. I was following it, pursuing truth before I met Jesus, and I’m still going to follow Him. And I’m glad He’s a person. Let me just tell you that. When you walk alone and you have the Lord, it fills you, and my life, even though I’m alone, even though I’m in Portland, I’m alone without my family, I am in a really good Spirit-filled church with the word that has kind of embraced me. I’m literally at the center of the church now as the pastor’s assistant. But it’s Him, it’s the Lord that fills me. I have time to study the word. I have time to worship Him. I have time to pursue education in apologetics and do ministry, so He’s filled my life. So it is different, but He is worthy. I don’t know what else to say. I think a lot of other Christians might look at it and say, “Wow, that’s a big sacrifice.” The Lord is worth it. And especially I know the joy of salvation. Every day, I know the joy of my salvation, because I know from whence I come, and that was hell. Literally being snatched from the jaws of death in the midst of depression and anxiety, suicidal often because of my vestibular issue and because of emotional scars from my past. I know what I’ve been given, and I know what I’ve been saved from, and I am not… what’s the word? Complacent about it. I am not complacent about my belief because of what He did for me and who the person of Christ is and the reunification with the Father and having the Holy Spirit. So my life has dramatically changed, and to know truth is the most glorious thing I can possibly imagine. So Portland… They can burn their flags, and they can ring cowbells in front of my house or whatever they’re going to do, and that’s fine. God bless them. They don’t have the knowledge yet. And I have great compassion, and I just remember Jesus on the cross saying, “Father, forgive them.” That’s my attitude towards Portland because they don’t know, and I’ve been given such a treasure and such a gift, and I’m so grateful that I have him in the midst of this. I can’t even imagine going through the world now, the way it is, with COVID and the elections and fires burning this summer and riots going on. I mean, my goodness! So I’ve got a grounding in truth, and I’ve got the peace of God and meaning and purpose, so yeah. It’s great living here because, in the middle of this darkness, they need the light, and we’re the light. I mean, I get to be the light! That’s amazing! What a privilege! What a privilege! And I’m thinking, for some people listening, they may not understand how you can be Jewish and Christian at the same time. Can you just very briefly put the dots together for that? Well, if Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jews, He’s the Messiah of no one. He came for the Jews first, to reunite the tribes, and then to the rest of the world. So I am more Jewish now than I have ever been. It’s just such a joy. I study the Torah. When I do Shabbat, His presence and being in the presence of the father is profound, but Jesus is a Jewish man, and that just… If I had just been given the New Testament, it would not have made sense. I have to have all, and His wisdom of the Torah and the Chinuch and the prophets and the writings, all of it, in order to be complete. Jesus completes… He stands at the center of Judaism and Christianity. He is the whole thing. He is the embodiment of God, the same God, the Holy One of Israel. So that’s what I would say. I think that Christianity is beginning to wake up, that those false divisions are being broken down. That’s what God wants. He wants us all united. There are no Jew or Gentile, male or female, none of it, in the kingdom of God. So yeah, He’s breaking down those walls for all of humanity and reuniting us back to the original Adam in the garden before the fall, so that’s what I would say. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for that, Nikki. As we’re wrapping up, I wondered if there was someone listening who valued truth like you did and like you still do. What would you say to a curious skeptic or a seeker or someone who really does want to know what is true and what grounds love and what is light and what grounds even, like you say, you had a strong sense of morality, a strong sense of good and evil, and you wanted to know what was true. What would you say to someone like that, who is open to seeking truth? Yeah, so I think you do have to be humble, and you do have to be open. I wasn’t. I never would’ve made it on my own. I admire atheists who actually have the humility to put their true bias aside and just seek after it. So if you’re truly seeking truth, then you have to approach it humbly. Because it is greater than you. Truth is always greater than you. Put it on the altar of deity in your life and seek it humbly. Ask questions. Follow it, even where you don’t agree necessarily. Look at all the sources. Truly be unbiased. Don’t exclude the Bible. Because it can be treated like a theory. You just want to see where the evidence best fits, and if it best fits on scripture, then that’s where the evidence leads. So that’s what I would say. There is a logic proof that the Lord had given me very early on, and it’s called the absolute truth proof. It’s very brief, and it’s that all claims of religion are claims of absolute truth, including atheism. They describe the nature and function of reality. But absolute truth is exclusive. It excludes everything that isn’t absolutely true, so that if there are differences in the claims of absolute truth, the differences between the claims of religion or atheism, that means that only one claim can be true. Now if that’s true, which it is – and that’s just logic. Well, which claim? Well, God’s going to make it easy. He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” He’s not claiming to be just one way among many, nor is he claiming to be a truth among many truths. He’s claiming to be the truth, the absolute truth. So if we’re going to start looking at truth, you can use that claim and just say, “Okay, let me take this claim seriously because I value truth. Let me look at the historical evidence. Let me look at the evidence for the resurrection unbiased.” Follow the evidence. Look at the scientific sources and then make your own decision. And don’t rule out people who are experts in the Bible. Because they’re going to know it better than you. Just like you would go to an expert in any field to look at the information, you also want to consider the claims seriously. So seek truth. Knock, and it will be opened to you, and the truth will set you free. That’s what I would say. That’s excellent. And again, you are speaking as a voice of wisdom and experience, as a light in your own culture. If you were speaking to Christians now as those who want to be light among those around them, what would you say to the Christian who wants to be like a Mary in your life or even in a different way addressing the issues, the intellectual issues with regard to truth, or whatever you think. Stereotypes or anything that you want to say. What would you say to the Christian in terms of them being a better witness to a resistant world? Fill yourself with God. Get to know Him. Make sure you have a good relationship with the Lord. Worship. Read the word. Take it seriously. It should come first. Secondly, if you’re going to talk to atheists, you want to lay a foundation. So one of the objections I had about Christianity that it was intellectually vacuous. I would ask someone, “Why do you think it’s true?” and they would say, “Because Jesus” something. And that did not… It’s not very satisfying when you’re an atheist. So if you really want to deal with atheists, you’re going to have to do the hard work of learning their perspective, learning what they know, and studying. So you want to do the preparation, which is work. Of course, you do that with a grounding in the gospel. No one’s going to listen to you if you’re shoving facts in their face because it’s disrespectful. Jesus gives us dignity. He comes from grace. He asks questions. He’s not forceful with anything, so we want to, when we’re preparing, just really embody Christ and treat the person in front of us as a person, as Jesus would, despite their beliefs. And build relationship. I would say that relationship is key. God is a relationship of three persons. He puts us in relationship. When He was here, He had his disciples. You see Him moving in relationship. That’s how He shares love. So, like with Mary, the reason I even listened to her is because she had ministered to me in relationship. She had shown her love and proved that to be true. If we think that someone doesn’t care about us, we’re not going to listen to them. No matter what, I would say. No matter how good the argument is, if there’s not love – 1 Corinthians 13 – there, you’re just going to be a noisy gong. So you have to ground it in true love for the person in front of you and true caring and then prepare. Yeah. That’s what I would say. Yeah. That’s beautiful. I am sitting here feeling so – I guess blessed is the best word I can come up with  – to hear your story. Just to have sat back and listened to the really extraordinary transformation in your life and how that happened. I mean, someone who was an atheist and so strongly against Christianity, an intellectual atheist who believed that nothing supernatural was real, and then you encounter this incredible supernatural reality in the person of Christ, but of course, at that point, too, you had made a choice to be open to that coming into your life, to that person coming into your life, that truth, that love, that energy, and that speaks to all of us, really, that we all need to have an openness to truth, wherever that evidence leads. Whether we’re Christian or non-Christian or wherever, that should be our posture, one of humility. I mean if we know anything as humans, we know that we’re very finite! And we’re very fallen, right? But God overcomes those, and like you say… I love what you said about the fact that He will show up if you are earnestly seeking. So thank you for your story, Nikki. It really is extremely powerful and such a privilege to have you on the podcast today. Bless you. Thank you so much. You’re very welcome. Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Nikki’s story. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next podcast, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.

Former atheist Stuart moved from a world without God to one where God changed his whole world. Stuart’s new book, Faith that Lasts: A Father and Son on Cultivating Lifelong Belief, is co-authored with his son, Cameron. They reconsider each myth in the light of the Christian faith and their own experiences. When our confidence is rooted in the good news of Jesus, our homes can be places of honest conversation, open-handed exploration, and lasting faith. For more information on events and resources, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org 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. Sometimes we look at others, and we think, “They will never change their views, their lives, their decisions, what they believe.” Sometimes we think to ourselves we will never change our views, our lives, our decisions, our beliefs. That certainly was the case for the majority of the 52 former atheists that I’ve interviewed. Two-thirds of them thought they would never change from being an atheist, much less become a Christian. That begs the million dollar question: What would it take for someone to change their lives so dramatically? More than that, what did it take? What was the catalyst that turned someone so resolute against God to a place of openness towards God? More specifically, towards Jesus Christ. In my research, the catalyst was different for different people. There’s certainly not one size fits all. For some, it was sudden. For others, quite gradual. For some, it was a crisis moment. For others, it was along the process of their life. It may have been prompted by existential dissatisfaction, looking for something more in life. For others, it may have been a quest to disprove religion or even to quest for truth itself. Still others, it was an unlikely spiritual experience. It may have been meeting a Christian for the first time who completely broke down their negative stereotypes of Christianity, someone who was intelligent and kind, and well, normal. Someone who makes Christianity look attractive, even plausible. Each person’s story is different. If you’ve been listening to these stories of change through this podcast, I would encourage you to begin actively searching for and identifying the catalyst, that thing or combination of things that moved someone towards considering another life-changing perspective. Today’s story is of a former atheist, someone, if you looked on from the outside, you would never in a million years think they would ever change, but change he certainly did. Not only did his own life dramatically change, but since his conversion to Christianity, he has spent his life helping many others see things differently as well. I hope you’ll listen closely to his surprising journey to see if you can identify the catalyst that opened him towards another direction. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Stuart. It’s so great to have you! My privilege to be here. I look forward to talking with you. Well, we’re looking forward to hearing your story, but before we get into the story, Stuart, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps what you do? Well, I am originally from Glasgow in Scotland and was raised in a non-Christian home. I became a Christian when I was just turning 21 in Glasgow in Scotland and then pretty much got involved in a call to mission right from the beginning of my Christian life, so I moved to Vienna, Austria, where I was working as a part of a team taking Bibles and literature into the Communist world at that time. I operated there for a number of years, and I actually met my wife, who was from America, Mary, on the team, was married in Chattanooga, then went back to Vienna, and both my kids, Cameron, my daughter Catherine, who works here in Atlanta, were born in Austria, where we lived for, in total, 20 years, so brought me to sunny Atlanta from Glasgow through Vienna, Austria, to this beautiful city of Atlanta. It sounds like you’ve journeyed quite a long way in your life since atheism. Why don’t we go back to the beginning and I guess this would be in Scotland. And why don’t you talk with me a bit about what life is like in Scotland in terms of, I guess, worldview or view of God or those kinds of things that were in your world as you were growing up. Yes, well the Scotland I grew up in—of course Scotland has a rich Christian heritage, but that’s a long way off now. Many people would see Scotland today, and particularly as I was growing up, as very much a secular country. My dad was a product of the second world war in a sense. He’d been a young man in the Royal Air Force, and the home that I grew up in—my mother had actually fled Christianity. She had been raised in a very devout Nazarene home in a Holiness-type church, and she had chafed against the restrictions. She loved her parents but hated the restrictions of that kind of life, so Dad became a ticket out to her. So when they met, fell in love, and got married, really it was a new beginning for her, and so the home I grew up in was one in which there was kind of a religious background roughly because of Mom’s background, but they had really chosen very much a kind of a party lifestyle in a sense. I don’t mean that in an overt way, but I mean, drinking and smoking became a big thing to my mother, for some reason, and at the weekends, that was a big part of our household. And for me, growing up, in terms of ideas, it was very much the postwar years. Economics were a bit tight. And as far as Christianity went, there was very little presence of it, other than the symbols of Scotland. I never saw it as having any traction or relevance or value in my life whatsoever, and my interests were just more like a little boy, the usual kind of things of adventure and having excitement and fun, and that’s pretty much the way it was until my teen years. So you may have had some kind of cultural reference of God or Jesus, on a building somewhere perhaps, but it obviously wasn’t in your home. Yes. My grandmother was devout, and I really didn’t like her because she had . . . . I guess I’d her hear quote Bible verses now and again, but I was kind of a raucous kid, and I think not a kid that stayed within the lines, which led to, when I became a teenager, then my parents saw me being drawn to a gang culture in the east side of Glasgow, so my dad, being at that time doing well in his business, bought a house on the west side of Glasgow, which is a more middle class area, and I hated it from day one, right from the beginning. As I went to the school there, I was just alienated and ended up skipping class most of the time, and then, as many young teenagers do in Scotland, I found my way to get alcohol. You know, usually if you hung around pubs, you could get some drunk to buy you booze, and I started getting drunk at an early age, so that really began a pattern that was to have kind of a sad outcome in my early teens, actually. So you really pushed against convention, it sounds like. You wanted to go your own way from an early age. I guess . . . . Did you find other friends? Or were you part of that gang culture? Or did you find other friends that reinforced that kind of dark lifestyle or party lifestyle? Like kids do, you find the other kids who are the wild kids, so there was a guy in particular, this Ian Cassells, a friend and I. We teamed up, and he was the one that introduced me to Alice Cooper and some of these things, so there was music that was, at that time, it was that real youth rage kind of music, Alice Cooper being kind of there, and of course, the Stones and the Beatles were more in the background. They were classic groups, but this more angry rock. And then . . . so drinking and fighting particularly. It all led to a conclusion where I came home drunk one night and ended up getting into a major fight with my father, as he had seen I’d been drinking, and he actually hit me, and I . . . . All this pent-up rage towards him came out, so I had this knock down, slap out fight, which led to me then basically leaving home when I was 15 years of age. Wow! What was that life like? Trying to survive on your own as a teenager? Well, there was two pieces to it. First was the excitement of being on your own and having nobody to tell you what to do, but the other thought was of survival. I mean I didn’t know how to wash my own clothes, didn’t know how to cook my food, and I didn’t realize the money that I was earning, which wasn’t terribly much at that point, had to go to pay my rent and cover my costs, you know? But what it did do is it brought me into a world where I guess I was seeking a new family, and during that time, I ended up beginning to work in a dance hall as a bouncer. A guy that had invited me and we’d met in the shop I was working in. And that opened up a whole new world for me. This was the world of parties and girls, and I mean, a dance hall, when I say a discotheque, there were about 1,500 to 2,000 kids over the weekend, so it was a huge place, and I was part of the security team there. And yeah, that just brought me into a new way of just living for my passions and pleasures, really, you know? So that was, in a sense, your life, just living for the moment, living for pleasure. Was that your personal philosophy in life? Just kind of eat, drink, merry, and then we die. Or- Well, it grew to be that. I got recruited by a guy who was part of a car business but involved in Glasgow’s darker side, and he wanted young drivers to drive cars from one place to another. I didn’t have a driver’s license, but I ended up working for him. And he took a shine to me, and I liked what it was. These were tough, hard men on the south side of Glasgow, and of course, I began to get trusted as a faithful lieutenant, so I was in that world, and things began . . . driving nice cars, earning a bit of money, beginning to do some stupid things, and yeah, my philosophy became . . . I mean, just being wild and free. I guess I can remember we’d have these drunken parties, and sometimes we’d buy so much beer and whatever, vodka usually, and we would joke that we’d drink till we passed out. Well, the only one that ever did, as far as I remember, was me. So yeah, that was the world, and everything in that seemed that that was the trajectory. Just live for passion and pleasure. Also against my parents’ middle class lifestyle, I was involved in a kind of criminal set and seemed to rejoice just that suckers lived by rules, and those of us who were the wise dogs just did what it took to get ahead, you know? Right, right. Wow. It sounds like . . . I imagine, as a teenager, living in that world would be somewhat exciting, although a little bit dangerous, but I guess, as a young man, though, it seemed like you were living the life in your own way and on your own terms. Well, we glorify all this today, Jana. I mean, I look at a lot of movies and things, that kind of stuff, and of course, that’s exactly right. There was money. And I mean of course there were a lot of boring times and hard times and stupid times in the midst of it all, but the idea of thinking in your mind you’re a tough guy and that you’re making money and you’re cool and all this kind of stuff. Well, then, in the midst of that, I was asked to help a lady, a married woman, who was living as the lover of a policeman and had got into some trouble. This guy was kind of extorting her, and I was asked, with my colleague, to help her out and see if I could get her money back from this cop, which I did, and this girl ended up moving in with me, so all of a sudden . . . She was 23 years old. I was then 18, 19, and I had this beautiful girl. She wanted to live with me then. Driving cars. And I thought everything was pretty cool. So I had achieved what I felt was kind of a nice status in life, and I was pretty happy with the way things were at that point, you know? Right, right. Wow. So with achieving this nice status—you had a girl, you had a job, and you were getting along—so there was really no sense or even thought of God of in your life. We there any kind of spirituality or interest in anything? Or exposure to? Or anything like that during this time? There was some very dark stuff. This was around the time—I don’t know if you remember Peter Blatty film The Exorcist? Yes. Well, I had some friends that were occultists. At least that’s what they said they were. I didn’t really believe it, but I’d gone and saw that film, and I have to say, it really freaked me out. It scared me, and I don’t know why. I mean, I didn’t believe in God, so I thought, but I certainly seemed to believe in the devil, and then, with my colleagues one night at a party I was having in my apartment, these guys . . . a couple of them went off in another room with some of the girls, and they were supposedly doing some kind of a seance thing. Anyway, something did happen. Something happened. I remember there was a sound like a cracking on a window. The whole place went very cold. And everybody got freaked out. And in fact, the party came to a sudden end, and this big friend of mine, Big Stuart. I was Little Stuart; he was Big Stuart. He was absolutely freaked out. I’d never seen someone so scared in all my life. He said, “Something’s happened here,” and one of our friends was a Catholic, so we commissioned him to go and find a priest and come and do something in the house, which the priest laughed at and didn’t come. But the long and short of that was we had to abandon that. I moved out of that apartment within about three or four days. There was something freaky. And that always left a backstop. So that was a spiritual thing but not on the usual variety that most people would tend to, you know? Right, right. So there was this sense, this presence or exposure to dark spirituality. You felt a touch of it in The Exorcist as a film, but you also felt a touch of it in your own apartment, so much so that you moved out. That must have been incredibly frightening. I can’t imagine! But I’m just curious—if you encountered or had a sensibility that there was a dark spiritual world, did it ever cross your mind that there might have been some alternative form of spirituality that’s good or God or any of that? I think the key that came . . . and there was some follow through from that because there were some subsequent dark experiences, and the only word I could use about that time was terror, Jana. I mean I’d never felt fear . . . . You know, we’d been in fights and things. I mean, people get scared when you’re fighting, and you can get hurt or winded or whatever, and this was a different kind of thing. This was of a whole ‘nother dimension. And the next encounter with spirituality was when, after a couple of years, Joyce came in one day and asked me what did I think about Jesus. And that absolutely threw me for a loop because I never thought anything about Jesus, other than the fact, you know, whatever his name was, but I thought that he was probably maybe a spaceman who had came to earth and they were so primitive . . . I mean, it’s so naive, the way I thought . . . but they worshiped him. So I basically had written Christianity off. It had no traction whatsoever. But then she ended up having a real encounter with Christ and became a Christian, and we split up because I really didn’t understand any of that and wasn’t interested, so that was the beginning of a more positive turn. Ah. So even the thought of Jesus or her becoming a Christian was very off-putting to you, I guess. Yeah. There was nothing attractive or interesting. To me, I think my philosophy was kind of a Nietzschean view, that life was for just take. It was seize whatever you wanted and keep it. And then there was a survival of the fittest type of thing. So probably a lot of ideas that I hadn’t really fully understood, but they were in my bloodstream, and the idea of any transcendent order of a God or Christ or forgiveness or any of that, even goodness just wasn’t there really. Wow. So you were willing to give up the relationship because you didn’t want to have anything to do with God or Jesus. What happened or proceeded from there? Or actually, I’m curious, how is it that your friend, Joyce, became a Christian in this world that you all inhabited? Well, there’s two things to that. One was that Joyce was really like, now that I know the Bible, she was really the woman at the well who had multiple relationships, many men, seeking in lust in a sense and relationships for love and never finding it, and in desperation, while she was with me, she’d had an affair even while she was with me, she reached out and went to a church one day. And she’d been witnessed to by a nice Christian couple in the tax office in Glasgow where she was working, and they had a big impact on her, and she walked into a church and said, “I need to know God.” So she had a genuine, I mean a very strong encounter of forgiveness and healing and really meeting God, and when she told me this, I just basically told her to get lost. So for about two or three weeks, and I was mad, and in fact, I didn’t know who this God was, but I thought, “Whoever these Christians are, if I ever meet them, I’ll put them right,” you know? Right. Well, yeah. That’s who you were, right? You were a bouncer. You were someone who didn’t mind going after. Yeah. So that’s actually what happened. A couple of weeks later, the Christian friends, who I didn’t know were praying for me, suggested to Joyce that she contact me and ask me to come to their house, so she called me, and thought, “Oh, maybe she’s coming back,” and of course, it wasn’t that. She wanted me to meet them. So I went with a chip on my shoulder and ready to do battle, and it didn’t work out that way. What happened? Well, we got there, and they were obviously . . . they were quite excited to meet me. They were very nice. The guy was kind of a soft, gentle human being, which I didn’t take to. That wasn’t my world. The wife was a kind of cutie, and I liked her, and I didn’t know she was an evangelist. And of course Joyce was there. And they began to share, and I mean I began by throwing back all kinds of stupid comebacks which I think were relevant, but as the night wore on, they testified about who God was, who Jesus was, about sin, about brokenness, and of course, Joyce continued to tell her testimony. And yeah, I don’t know how long it was, but eventually I became there was a presence. There was something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, kind of an intuition of something, but this time not dark. Good. And after them sharing for some time, I ended up going up to their bathroom, because I became convinced it was real, and thought, “Well, God if you’re there, and this is true, and Jesus really . . . You are the Lord, then I need to know You. I’m a mess. I need help, and I need forgiveness, and I’ve done some real wrong here,” so I prayed in their bathroom and then ended up . . . came down and told them, and they all started hugging me, and that was really a “Whoa!” That was a bridge too far at that point, but something began then. That was the beginning of the story, really, for me. Wow! What a dramatic shift in such a short period of time, in just a moment practically. How old were you here? Just turning 21. It was just on the cusp of my 21st birthday. Right. Because you had been thinking and living in seemingly the opposite way of what the truth that you had just accepted. Totally, yeah. Yeah. Everything that I stood for was so violent. I mean everything, language, behavior, thought. I mean it just . . . . Violence and anger was a central part of this, because I really had been kind of framed to believe that if someone crosses you, you hit them. Right. And if the police become involved, well hit them, too! I mean, a see if they can get you kind of thing, you know? So it was really a messed up idea. So talk with me then about this sudden change, yet you just chose, and that evening, because of the reality of the presence of God, of who God is and who you were before God and need of forgiveness. You obviously found that gospel, that good news of Jesus that actually forgives and, like Joyce found, that loves you no matter what or who you are or what you’ve done. I imagine that concept by itself was just transformative, but I can imagine how this might play out in your life. I mean such a sudden change, and like you say, so many things differently. How did your life change? Did you start reading the Bible? Did you go to church? Your heart, your mind, all of those things. Talk with me about that. Yeah. I mean, gosh, Jana, it all happened very quickly because I think the passage that struck me very clearly was 2 Corinthians 5:21 or 17 first of all. You know, “If any man is in Christ, he’s a new creation.” 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” And all of that was really impressed very deeply on my soul right from the beginning. So I mean I was told . . . These people who led me to the Lord were very devout and encouraged me, of course, to come to their church, which was a Brethren Assembly in the east side of Glasgow, and the Bible and prayer. I was taught . . . Of course, I started, from day one, just starting to read the Bible. I didn’t really understand it very much, but I really got into reading nonstop and of course it was like . . . I couldn’t even describe what effect it had on me. Reading and then praying, and I went to this little church, and then I started having fellowship with these Christians, and of course, they were a whole different world. I mean, the way that they talked and acted. They didn’t swear. They didn’t do any of the wild stuff. And I kept thinking, this may be kind of boring, I thought, but then they could have fun without alcohol or without violence. They could enjoy each other. And so really, for me, because I’m still in my old world. I was caught between my work world, where I was still with these gangsters basically, and then every moment of the day I could, I would go to the church or go to this young couple who discipled me. I’d go to their house, and it was simply extraordinary to me. It was marvelous, you know? Wow, wow. So your life and your decisions and your choices just started changing. I guess you didn’t stay in the work that you knew? Well, several things happened very quickly. I’d only been a believer for about two weeks, and I was encouraged by this couple to go to this Christian camp. I didn’t even know what a Christian camp was. And normally I worked seven days a week, and monthly, the guy who I worked for—I was his lieutenant. He normally wouldn’t be keen to give me time off, but anyway, for some reason, he let me know, and off I went, and at that camp, God really spoke to me. There was Bible teaching every day. There were games. There were all kinds of things. And I got just turned upside down about the lordship of Christ, mission, and God spoke to my heart very clearly, Joyce and I, about . . . . We thought that, now that we were Christians, she would get divorced, and we would get married. I just thought that was the right thing to do. And then I heard some teaching there that put that into question, and that became one of the first tests of my early Christian life. Because really we were . . . I thought the Lord was asking us to split up, and I did that, and that was very, very hard on us both. But that was the first test of obedience early on in my Christian faith. Oh, my. And I’m curious: The folks that you worked with. I imagine they were somewhat surprised by your life change and your decisions. Yeah. That’s the understatement. Well, first of all, they thought I had been brainwashed, so there was a real attempt on their part to try to help me and then to mock the faith. I mean, they would do some ridiculous things, like, after several weeks of talking . . . Of course, I didn’t know anything, and they would ask questions about, “Well, where is God?” and, “Where is Jesus?” “Where’s the proof?” and all this kind of stuff. “It’s a lot of nonsense.” “You don’t need to believe that.” At first, it was out of curiosity. Then it became anger. Then it became a determination to de-convert me, and at one point, they were cutting out all the centerfolds from Playboy magazine and all this kind of thing and posting them all over the office, so there were naked women all in our office. And it was at that time that I discovered there was a thing called a Christian bookstore, which I didn’t even know existed. And when I went to this Christian bookstore, they had these things called tracts, and you could buy them, whole bunches of them, like 100 for a pound or whatever it was at the time. So I bought hundreds of these tracts, and then I would go back and paste them all over these naked women! These tracts. And then when Monty and the guys came in, they would tear off . . . . They tore all the pictures off the wall because of all these Bible verses all over the top of them. So the literature war started at the beginning, and that went on for a little while, but it stopped fairly quickly. Wow. Okay. But they were obviously posing questions to you that you didn’t know how to answer, and they were determined to de-convert you and de-construct your faith. I wonder, did that kind of push back, did that compel you in any determined way to look for those answers that you didn’t seem to have at the beginning? I think in a curious way. Because they asked questions, and then, as I would talk to my Christian friends . . . . They would point me to the Bible, and say, you know, “Show me the answers,” and of course, as I began to read the scripture, I found there were answers. So, over time, I began to read the gospels and to find out what it actually said. And the caricatures of Christianity, I realized that they were throwing were not true, so really, in the early days, it was developing an apologetic in the sense of, “I know that you think this is what it says, but that’s not what it says. This is what it means.” So part of it was learning to understand, well what was the gospel actually about. What were the claims? And many of the things that they believed—they still rejected the truth, but I could answer the caricatures fairly readily. And I think that was probably a good school to get me started on my own Christian defense of how to do evangelism, how to answer hard questions, in a sense. You know, I can just imagine the skeptic listening to this and listening to your journey and thinking, “Oh, he just found answers to satisfy the questions just because he had already converted.” You know what I’m saying? That you found the answers that you were looking for. So I wonder what you would say to the skeptic about that, in terms of—I know that, as you were reading the Bible, that the caricaturing of Christianity was being defeated in your own mind. But for those who might be pushing back on you still, or pushing back on this story, how would you answer that? Yeah. Well, there’s two things I would say, Jana. One is, first of all, we’d need to lengthen the story out. One would be that I wrestled. I had doubts myself. I took the doubts that I had—when I came across hard passages in the Bible, and most of them were hard because I didn’t understand many of them, I would argue with my Christian friends to try and get an interpretation to understand, so I didn’t give them an easy time. But there was this experience of God that was real. It was an encounter. It wasn’t just an idea. The heart of this was there were concepts involved, but I was overwhelmingly gripped by the presence of God and by ongoing answers to prayer. The second part would be, as my Christian life unfolded, I began to deal more with the objections and then try to read books. Because in my first Christian experience when I went on mission the following year, I was arrested and put in jail in Yugoslavia taking materials into the Communist world, and I was interrogated repeatedly. So these were Marxist people. If someone could talk me out of this by a set of ideas and concepts, then I would give it up, but I was willing to expose myself to the thought of others. And I have tried to do that all my Christian life since then. And if there are objections, that doesn’t mean to say all the answers I’ve found have been tidy or nice or neat, but I found that the Christian faith stands up to robust examination, and I don’t find that that’s a threat. And it wasn’t just my emotions. It was an experience, including my mind, that was involved in my conversion. Thank you for clarifying that. Because I think it could be very easily misinterpreted, I guess, but yes, very much you’re encountering with a Person, the Person of God, in a strong and powerful presence, as well as, like you say, answer to prayer and then it just becomes more fully orbed intellectually and in your heart and in every way, I guess so much so that I’m surprised that you, it sounds like, almost immediately changed your life from the vocation that you had almost into mission. You must have been strongly compelled. Yes. I mean I really heard . . . I mean they use the word “a call,” but I did hear a call. I was in Moniaive in Scotland at the time, and they’re preaching particularly from Luke 9 and Jesus saying, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me,” and I really knew that was to me. And I had to follow. So I didn’t know what that meant, but what eventually I did was I sold into my bank accounts. I redid the kitchen at my mom’s house, fitted that out. I put a coffee bar into my church. I gave the rest to mission and sold everything else I had, my car included. And took a suitcase and joined Operation Mobilisation, believing, at that point, that was it. I was leaving, never to go back. That’s quite a transformation, I must say, in terms of your own purpose, your own understanding of reality, and who God is, who you are, and your role in the world. It sounds like you had found something you wanted others to find as well. I mean, you were willing to give up everything for Jesus and give up everything so that others could know what you knew. Well, because at the heart of this . . . . I mean I saw a young man killed before my eyes. I was involved in fights. I saw people on drink and drugs. I saw the worst of humanity in those days, in the early days. And I thought that was reality. When I realized that I lived in a world that God created, that there was a God that loved us, a God that knows us, that there is a destiny and a possibility, that salvation . . . . Not just going to churches and being religious or becoming a conservative person, but understanding what we’re made for, that there is a type of life, and there’s eternal life beyond this, that this world is not the end of the story, it’s just a stage in it, but it’s important in his own right. I mean, I ended up having categories for truth and goodness and beauty and meaning and family.  Things that I had just no idea how rich this was, and Christianity was not boring. I mean, the people I was working with were laying down their lives. I had people who died while we were in Vienna because they were missionaries. My wife was on a team in Turkey where her team leader was shot dead at the door, and his wife nearly at the end of her pregnancy with their first child. So these were people who are willing to die because of Christ, not just as an idea, as a concept, but as a living reality. So, for me, it was an all or nothing. I mean, I had found the truth and reality, and I wanted to live my life and share my life and share the truth of this life, as I was commanded by the Lord, with as many as I could for the rest of my days. Wow. That’s really amazing. It reminds me a lot of those who had been with Jesus at the very beginning, and that they died for not only what they believed but what they saw, what they believed they saw and had an experience with Christ, and they knew it was true. And that mandate, or that experience, actually, in a sense, goes on with a real God who really exists who shows his presence when you call, so you have come a long way. I mean you’re still in the mission field in a sense, but in a very different way than being overseas in Yugoslavia. You still travel the world. Talk with me a little bit about what you’re doing now. Well, in my later journey in Europe, I developed in leadership and things and would want to speak up about the Christian faith, and I knew about apologetics. I’d never thought of apologetics as my front-line thing, but I was involved in Christian leadership and witness. I knew that we had to do that. We had to give a reason for the hope that was in us, and we had to do that against Marxism and existentialism and all the ideas of this time, and in my own journey, I’d done a lot of reading and thinking because I’d had hundreds of hours of conversations with people of faith, no faith, or other faiths about the meaning of Christianity and to bring it into the public square. So I was asked to be a public voice for the Christian faith, either helping the thinker to believe or the believer to think, and that’s really kind of what I’ve been involved in for the last 23 years. So you’ve really dealt thoroughly with and have a really deep understanding of these worldviews around the world, all these competing worldviews in our very, very pluralistic world, but yet you remain convinced that the Christian worldview is worth contending for. We encounter so many of these different worldviews really in our own lives today, no matter where you are, because of the global nature of technology. And we feel all these different worldviews pressing in on us. Yeah. I learned I had to do my homework. A lot of this was reading books and talking to people, so I would ask people, finding out what were the questions that we all had to answer and looking for ways to compare them. I mean, I’ve talked to many Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and of course atheists in abundance. But yes, the truthfulness of the Christian faith and its ability to answer the question in a way that none of the others do has been one of the reasons why I remain committed to the Christian faith. I mean I fully . . . . Its coherence, its clarity. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean it’s tidy. Are there things that make us sometimes draw our breath. There are passages in the Old Testament and so forth that give us pause, but the God of the Old and New Testaments is one, and I am fully comfortable in my faith and confident to share it and leave the onus on the individual to weigh it up and consider the evidence, the facts, and the arguments for the Christian faith if they’ll give it an honest look. And it’s my hope that there are some curious skeptics or perhaps honest seekers who are exploring or even considering the possibility of God and Jesus Christ through Christianity. If there are those listening, what would you say to, say, a nonbeliever or a skeptic for them to consider the reality of God and Christianity? Well, there’s all kinds of books that can be read, and sometimes those are a mixed bag. There are testimonial books. But I would obviously encourage a person to begin with the gospels themselves and just read particularly Mark or John’s gospel and then they could, by all means, ask critical questions. Talk to someone who’s a believer. Talk to someone in the faith. Let them answer your skeptical questions. We’re not afraid, as a Christian, of the questions, “Is the Bible true?” “Why should I trust the gospel?” Just reading the gospels themselves, by the earliest witnesses to the story of Jesus, and they’re not all exactly the same. There are four gospels, which are like four angles looking on a diamond, and I think the questions will rise from the text, from what you see in that, and why we believe that Christianity is true, why it is a better answer than atheism or the alternatives. Ravi used to use this idea of origins, meaning morality, and destiny as four questions that every worldview should be answering. We can compare them, what it says about origins, what is the meaning of life, is there meaning in life, is there a basis and a ground and a focus for morality, death, is there something after death or not? How does the other world system or the person’s worldview answer those questions? How does the gospel answer those questions? And when I look at what the Christian answers to those questions are, I find that it offers a compelling reason intellectually, as well as morally and existentially, for a life well lived, and to meet God. Because that’s what it comes down to at the end of this. If God’s just an idea . . . we’re not talking about concept. If there’s no God there, there’s nothing to ask for. But if we knock at the door and someone on the other side answers, then now we’re accountable, and that’s often the reason why people don’t want to even give it a shot. Right, right. And just for those who perhaps haven’t looked at a Bible before and don’t understand the reference of the gospels themselves, can you explain where the gospels are or what they are in the Bible? Well, the gospels are found in the New Testament, and if you have just a simple New Testament, it starts . . . . The first four books are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the gospels are the recordings of those who witnessed the live of Jesus and saw the events and particularly contain the teachings and basically they’re really like a theological biography, if you like. Written in an ancient style, of course, but to ask the question—each one of them asks the question, “Who is this? Who is this Jesus?” So that’s the question that they were written for, and I think, if you would read them and give them an honest hearing, you would understand then some of the questions that came out as to the back story into which Jesus came, the story of the universe, the story of covenant. What do those words mean? Why were they important? Why did Jesus die? And what difference did that death make. And resurrection. Is resurrection a possibility? And if it happened, what would that mean? Well, those are the questions that the gospels seek to address, and therefore, that’s always a good place, I think to start. For the Christians who are listening to your story today, Stuart, how could you encourage them? You just spoke about the seeker, perhaps, taking with somebody who actually is living the Christian life. How would you encourage us as Christians to perhaps engage better or understand the questions that are being asked of us? Well, Jana, there’s nothing like being willing to witness to deepen your faith because you have to break the sound barrier by talking to people and then be willing to engage their questions. There’s so much fear and laziness in the church, so that we don’t share because either we don’t know or we don’t care enough. I think evangelism—it’s not a duty. We’re called to be witnesses. That’s part of what Jesus said in Matthew 28. Sent us into all the world to make disciples. So we should be willing to talk to people, to ask them questions, to share the love, and that means we have to do our homework. It doesn’t mean to say we have to study theology completely and memorize every sermon, but we will need to do some of our homework over time. Don’t be afraid of questions! When someone comes with a question you can’t answer, you can go do your homework. Find an answer! But if we love people and we believe that this is the truth, then out of compassion and conviction we should be motivated enough to try to find answers to pass the truth along. And not be afraid. And Jesus said, “Lo, I am with you always.” The Holy Spirit will be with us in our witnessing and how we witness and what we share, so it becomes a part of the adventure of faith and walking with God in this world and being witnesses, to His life, to His love, and to His care, in our time. I don’t want to end before I give you an opportunity, Stuart, to tell us about a new book that you and your son have written that’s about to be published. Would you talk with us about that? Yes. My son came up with the idea of us writing a book together because we get a lot of questions here about raising kids and the family and particularly in the hostile climate that often is our culture today, movies and music and so forth. So because I was raised in a non-Christian home and then I raised my kids, of course, I was always terrified that I would inoculate my kids against the gospel by maybe my imperfections, my lifestyle. By God’s grace, they trusted the Lord, so we’re grateful for that. The book that we’ve written together is Faith That Lasts: A Father and Son on Cultivating Lifelong Belief. So what we’re doing in the book is to talk about some of the questions that we get from Christian parents, and some of what we felt were the mistakes made, particularly three big ones. Using fear as a controlling mechanism in the home, believing that information alone saves and trying to bombard your kids just with facts, and then outsourcing children or kids to experts to try and save them or help them or whatever. And really what we want to talk about is the home and the parenting and the role of witnessing and taking the home as a place where hard questions can be dealt with safely, in a loving, safe environment. So the book comes out towards the end of the year. It will be on Intervarsity Press, and we’re quite excited and hope it will be a conversation starter. Excellent, excellent. I can’t wait to get my hands on that. I know it’s going to be a wonderful resource for so many Christians and parents alike. So thank you, Stuart. Your story is extraordinary. It really is one literally coming from darkness to light, to the person of Jesus, who is light and life and truth, and wow, I’m inspired by it. Sometimes I think that you can pre-judge someone or even yourself, saying, “I’ll never change my mind,” or, “They will never change their mind,” but in your case, that wasn’t the case. It’s truly extraordinary that someone can come from such a place of darkness to an amazing life in Christ. So thank you for sharing that with us. My pleasure, Jana, and I wish you every success with this, and may God bless the ministry and the opportunities to just talk to people and dialogue about important ideas and ideas that lead to life. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Stuart’s story. You can find out more about Stuart and his new book, Faith That Lasts, by looking at this episode’s notes. For questions and feedback about this podcast, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, please 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.

Dr. Ted Cabal shares his journey from atheism to Christianity, reflecting on personal experiences and the power of emotional connection. He discusses his role as a professor of philosophy and Christian apologetics, his marriage, and his battle with terminal cancer. The podcast explores the desire for freedom and independence, the influence of culture, and the importance of incorporating emotions into arguments. It also touches on the C.S. Lewis Institute, seeking pleasure, moral failure, and the journey of self-discovery.

There is often a presumption that religion is irrational, far from truth and reason. In today’s episode, Philip Vander Elst describes his “journey of discovery” from atheism to an intellectually-grounded Christian belief. Find out more about Philip and his writings at www.bethinking.org/author/philip-vander-elst Recommended resources from this podcast include: C.S. Lewis’s books:  Mere Christianity, Miracles  C.S. Lewis essay “On Obstinacy in Belief” N. Geisler and F. Turek: I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist J. Lenox: God’s Undertaker:  Has Science Buried God? L. Strobel:  The Case for Christ (book and film); The Case for a Creator 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 both sides of a story, from atheism to Christianity. It’s commonly said that people are religious merely because the people around them are, but what happens when the people you love believe in God and you don’t? You won’t believe in God because you don’t believe it’s true, no matter what they say. At the end of the day, truth and reason are more important than the potential of lost relationships. There were several in my research with former atheists who chose truth over social gain or loss. Today’s story with Philip wrestles with this difficult conundrum. If he remained an atheist, true to his belief in truth and reason, he would lose the one he loved. If he became a Christian, he would compromise his intellectual integrity. Conversion for social or emotional reasons alone was unthinkable. As an intellectual, a thinker, it would be immoral and dishonest. He would be denying his highest value, holding fast to truth. How could this situation be resolved? There is often a presumption that religion is irrational, far from objective truth and reason. For many, the assertion that scientific, philosophical, or historical truth can be found within the Christian worldview is simply nonsensical. Today, through Philip’s story, we’ll explore whether or not rationality and truth can be found, can be grounded in a religious worldview, specifically Christianity, or whether or not religion merely serves a social or emotional purpose. We’ll consider whether or not Christianity is worth believing, especially for the intellectual. Today, we’ll be talking with a true English gentleman and former atheist. Philip Vander Elst is a prolific writer and esteemed lecturer, working in and among forums discussing deep philosophical issues. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Philip. It’s wonderful to have you. Well, it’s lovely to be with you, Jana, and I’m looking forward to our discussion. Terrific! Me too. Before we get to your story, Philip, I’d love to know more about, and for our listeners to know more about, where you live and your academic study and work. Okay. Well, I live with my lovely wife Rachael. I live in a little village in West Oxfordshire in England, about 22 miles northwest of Oxford, and that was my old university, where I studied politics, philosophy, and economics in the early 1970s. I’m a freelance writer and lecturer, and so I spend my time writing stuff and getting it posted on the internet. I wrote a book on C.S. Lewis some years ago, amongst other things. I give occasional lectures on C.S. Lewis and indeed on Tolkien as well. And most of my professional life has been, since leaving Oxford, has been actually in politics and journalism. So really my world has been the world of ideas, and that’s what I’ve always been most concerned about, which is the battle for truth, the battle of ideas, the battle for hearts and minds, and that’s what makes me get up in the morning and gives purpose to my life. So, yeah. So that’s by way of some intellectual background and what I do, in terms of my work. And I write about politics and political philosophy, and I also write in the area of Christian apologetics. So that more or less sums up what I do. Fascinating. And so you live, actually, physically close to Oxford? Is that right? Yes. Yes, that’s right. I’m a life member of the Oxford Union Debating Society, a famous debating society which was set up in 1823, and I’m a former officer of that debating society, and so I have access to their wonderful library. It’s one of the finest private libraries in the world. So yes, I have access to Oxford libraries, which is always a great blessing to a writer and researcher like myself. Right. Yeah. That’s wonderful. I can’t imagine just being constantly inspired by being in that type of intellectual environment, constantly thinking and discussing. I remember visiting there in Oxford and the lovely bookstore, and I didn’t have access to the library, but it was just such a wonderful, wonderful place just to be. I can’t imagine being an academic there in that environment. What a privilege! It was lovely being there. So I know that you were an Oxford man, as it were, and that, during your time at Oxford, you weren’t a Christian. No, I wasn’t. So let’s take this way back to when your life started, as there are many things that influence atheism, of them being your family and your culture and the place where you grew up. So why don’t you take us back there to the beginning of your journey towards atheism and talk to us about how your life began, your early concepts of God, how your parents spoke into your life. Well, I grew up… I had a wonderful father and mother who were highly educated professionals. My mother had grown up and had her education in Germany before the war and in Switzerland during the war and was very proficient in modern languages. She became an interpreter and was the youngest interpreter at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946. My father was Belgian and was trained as a civil engineer and physicist in the 1930s, University Libre de Bruxelles, which was the secular university in Brussels. There was a Catholic one as well. And he was a brilliant scientist, and so my parental background was I’ve got these highly educated parents, English on my mother’s side, Belgian on my father’s side, but neither of them, although they were upright people with a strong sense of morality and belief in excellence and truth and very impressive human beings, they weren’t Christians. They didn’t believe in God. And one of the reasons for that was that they’d been put off religion and belief in God by their experience of Catholicism or the Catholic Church, and here, Americans need to understand something about European history, that on the mainland of continental Europe, particularly the Latin countries, like France, Belgium, Spain, and so on, the main Christian witness was the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church had been a persecuting church for much of its history, and so I grew in a mental universe where on one side you had reason and liberty and science and progress and on the other religion, authoritarianism, a persecuting church, and a generally obscurantist attitude to life, and so that was the kind of mentality that I grew up surrounded by, and in continental Latin countries, there has been this cleavage of kind of the intellectuals against the church sort of thing which you haven’t had in the same in the English-speaking world. And they personally, my father and mother, had personally bad experiences with Catholic priests. When my father’s father had died, the local priest had bought up lots of the books that he had that my grandmother sold, and the local priest burnt them because they were on Papal Index as forbidden literature, so these kinds of experience had put off my parents, off religion and so on. I do remember asking questions like, “Well, where does the universe come from?” and I think my father said that the universe had always been there, so it didn’t need any particular explanation. And that was, of course, the view of many intellectuals who didn’t believe in God, that the universe had always been there, so it didn’t need any particular explanation. And then, well, I didn’t come across any Christian stories. I didn’t come across the gospel or anything like that until I was at my first boarding school when I was eight years old, and then I came across all the scripture stories, David and Goliath and Abraham and Isaac, all those great stories from the Old Testament and of course some of the stories of the Gospels, and I was always top in scripture at school, so I liked the stories, and I remembered them, but I didn’t engage. I didn’t come across any intellectual arguments for Christianity and for God until I was at my second school, my second boarding school, which would be the equivalent of your high schools in America, and that was when my father died unexpectedly when I was only 17, and that was a great shock to my system, and so I was grief stricken and I suppose looking for meaning and comfort in life, and I dipped into C.S. Lewis, into his book Mere Christianity, his famous wartime broadcasts, and for a while, they held my attention, and I began to have contact with an intellectual argument for Christianity which was beginning to make some sense, but I was interested in politics at that time, and when you’re young, even when you suffer great grief, if you’re in a nice school, if you’ve got good friends, you’re young, you’re resilient. The grief gets submerged underneath other things. You’re thinking about life and what you’re going to go and do in the future and so on, and I started reading Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rand and anti-Christian writers, so my interest in Lewis sort of died, and I stopped reading Mere Christianity and drifted away from thoughts about God, so when I get to Oxford, I don’t believe in God. I’m not interested in religion. I’m only interested in politics and political philosophy and having a career in politics and journalism afterwards. So that’s where I was by the time I met my wife, Rachael, since we were both involved in conservative politics a few years after leaving Oxford. So that’s a kind of gallop through my past. So, Philip, you have quite a… It sounds like a very strong intellectual history, and there was a very clear understanding of what the church was to you in terms of perhaps some of the negative aspects of it. You heard some good stories, but you were more interested in truth and reason, and that, I think… where those stories that you read in the Bible were just merely stories, right? What did you perceive God and Christianity and Christians and those stories to be? Was it mythological? Was it social construction? What was your thought about what religion was at that time? I didn’t really think very deeply about the stories. I suppose I regarded them on the same level as The Twelve Labours of Hercules, stories from Greek mythology which I enjoyed. Like the story of Odysseus and the War of Troy and so on. So I didn’t really think about them very much. I did wonder whether there was a God because of this question of where does the universe come from, but I found it difficult to believe in God because, if God is good and our Creator, why is there evil and suffering in the world? Why is there so much cruelty and suffering and disease and so forth, so I couldn’t… Although I was aware of the argument for God from intelligent design, it seemed to me that argument was canceled out by the existence of evil and suffering, and I remember… It was the argument of Bertrand Russell. And Ayn Rand, reading Ayn Rand, as well as Bertrand Russell, made me think that worshiping God was really a kind of form of worshiping power. You worship God because he’s all powerful. And also the story of the fall in the Garden of Eden, you know, “You mustn’t eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” seemed to be to present a view of life where God is this omnipotent power that doesn’t want human beings to think for themselves but just to submit to him, so it was kind of a form of self abasement which was not worthy of human dignity and anyone who cared about liberty. So that was a very jaundiced, prejudiced, shallow view I had of God, derived from reading Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rand, and not really encountering Christians who could feed my intellect, apart from having dipped for a short while into C.S. Lewis, so then when I met my wife, Rachael, who was highly intelligent, and her Christian friends were also highly intelligent and lovely people, then I began to think… This began to challenge my prejudices and then made me think, “Well, perhaps I ought to go on a journey of discovery to see whether there is any good evidence for the existence of God and the truthfulness of Christianity and the truth of the gospel. So were you surprised to meet Christians who you thought were deemed intelligent in your mind? Well, yes. It’s funny how inconsistent people can be, because I had… There was an intelligent Christian chaplain who was called Dr. Pugh at my school, my independent boarding school which I attended before doing to university, and I remember some interesting conversations. I remember a conversation with him when I said to him, “Why it is important whether there is a God or not?” and he said to me, and his answer remained in my mind, “Well, because without God human beings have no value. Life has no value.” And I didn’t believe him at the time. I thought, well, we can just make it valuable, create value for ourselves, but nevertheless his answer, his question, his comment remained in my memory, so I had come across intelligent Christians, and my tutor at school—I had this wonderful tutor who was a history master, and he was a lovely, lovely man. He loved C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books and The Lord of the Rings, and we used to discuss how much we shared our love for these particular books over a cup of tea before a roaring log fire in his book-lined study at school once a week. So he was a lovely Christian and a highly intelligent, scholarly man, so it wasn’t that I said to myself rationally, “All Christians are idiots,” but I just hadn’t spent enough time, I suppose, with Christians and been interested enough to get them to talk about the reasons they believed in God and the truthfulness of the Bible and therefore I hadn’t encountered the arguments, as I say apart from this brief dip, which meant a lot at the time, into Mere Christianity after my father died. So you perhaps hadn’t, except for that dip, really appreciated the rationality of Christianity. I’m wondering… It was brought to your attention that… The gentleman said that you wouldn’t have human value without God. I wonder if you actually looked fully at the implications of the atheism that you were embracing or that you did embrace. No, I hadn’t. You see, that was the point. I hadn’t understood that, if atheism is true, if we are only the accidental byproducts of a meaningless and accidental universe, I hadn’t appreciated the argument that Lewis developed against atheism, which is that, if atheism is true, that means all our thinking processes are simply the inevitable, unplanned result of a long chain of non-rational biochemical causes at work in our brains and therefore how can we attach any truth or significance to our thoughts? We’re simply bound to think them because of what’s going on in our cerebral biochemistry, which discredits all thinking, including the arguments for atheism. And also if we are simply the accidental byproducts of a meaningless universe, then we’ve got no grounds for moral value. We can say, “Well, we choose to value life, and therefore anything that enhances life is good and anything that destroys life is evil,” but that conviction is, in itself, a moral axiom which needs justification, and unless our moral values, that moral law written in our hearts, is rooted in God, in a reality outside the chain of physical causation, of material being, we have no objective ground for this conviction that good is somehow an objective category. I suppose I’m jumping ahead, really, to the arguments which started making me doubt the truthfulness of atheism, but I just hadn’t understood this basic point, that atheism discredits our thinking processes, cuts its own throat philosophically as a result, and deprives any belief in moral obligation and the objectivity of moral values of any proper metaphysical foundation. Because somehow what’s interesting about the belief that raping a woman or torturing a child or telling lies is wrong is that these truths are somehow transcendent. I mean they remain through whether we live or die, whatever culture we’re part of, whatever time we’re born in. They remain eternally true, whether we acknowledge that truth or not, whether we die or not, they still remain true. As Plato believed, there are eternal categories, and yet how can such categories exist except outside time and outside the material universe, which therefore leads us to God, to a being or a power or a reality that is outside the physical universe. So that becomes a complicated philosophical argument, but it’s a true one, and I hadn’t understood it. I hadn’t even thought about it when I was an atheist. I had to read C.S. Lewis to come to that realization and understanding. So there was a strong what you felt rational presumption for the truth of atheism, but you said that you came to a point in your life where you actually met some Christians, particularly your wife, that caused you to step back and rethink your atheism and perhaps think a little bit more about Christianity. Talk with me about that. Okay. Well, I met Rachael, and I fell in love with her very quickly. We more or less got unofficially engaged after about the fifth date. So it was very swift. She hardly had time to say she was a Christian. Anyway, she had Christian friends who were praying for me, who started praying for me, and she, of course, was praying for me, so there was that going on spiritually, but I said to her, “Look, I’m not going to become a Christian just because you’re a Christian, but I will go on a journey of intellectual discovery. I want to see whether I can find answers to my questions, like what is the evidence for God? What is the evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity?” So I read C.S. Lewis books, C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles. Oh yes, actually I ought to say, before I did that, I read a paper he wrote for the Oxford Socratic Club, which was a debating club to discuss God and religion and so on. It was a debating forum that was set up during the war in Oxford to bring Christians and atheists together in intellectual debate and argument, and Lewis was the president of the Oxford Socratic Club, and he often gave papers or talks to that club, which were then answered by atheist philosophers the next week, and then he replied to them and so on. And one of these papers was called, “On Obstinacy and Belief,” where he discusses the issue of faith. When Christians say you ought to have faith, what do they mean? And he said it does not mean that you ought to believe in God without any evidence. He argued that if you genuinely thought there was no evidence for God, no good arguments for God, philosophical or historical, then it was perfectly correct for you to seek out those arguments, to try and find out whether Christianity and belief in God could withstand forensic intellectual examination, historical evidence, logical arguments, and so on. When Christians, when the Bible talked about you need to have faith, that’s a commandment aimed at people who already knew that there was a God and were being asked to believe God, were challenged to have faith in God, when it involved believing some commandment or promise of His that seemed impossible of fulfillment, the famous example, of course, being when the Lord says to Abraham and Sarah, “You’re going to have a child in old age,” and they find that hard to believe. But faith involves a personal relationship with a God you already believe in. But if you don’t believe in God at all in the first place, then it’s okay to search for the evidence. So because I knew that this was Lewis’s attitude and that Lewis himself had been an atheist, I thought, “This is a guy in whose footsteps I can walk because he’s somebody who’s honest, who cares about truth, who understands why people are atheists, and so I can confidence that, if I read his books, I might actually find answers to my questions. So I started reading Miracles, where, the first three chapters, he proves the existence of God philosophically, and to come back to this argument that I was referring to earlier, where he says that the problem with atheism is, if we’re only physical beings, unplanned physical beings, the accidental byproducts of a purely physical universe, then all our thinking is simply the unintended and unplanned end result of the mindless movement of atoms in our brain, which is just as likely to produce falsehood as truth, and therefore we have no reason for believing in the truth of any of our conclusions. So in other words, atheism discredits thinking, because it makes all our thoughts the inevitable result of our cerebral biochemistry, of non-rational physical events, and as Lewis said, we don’t accept the truthfulness of any conclusion if it can be shown to be purely the result of non-rational causes, but that’s exactly what atheism essentially implies for all our thinking processes. So atheists cut their own throat philosophically. And then the other great argument of Lewis’s that influenced me was the argument he uses when dealing with the problem of evil, which is that we can only complain about evil if we already have a prior sense of good, just as you can only tell a line is crooked because it’s a deviation from a straight line, and you already have the idea of a straight line in your mind, so we can only complain about evil if we have a standard of good in our minds, of objective goodness, and therefore the question then becomes, “Well, where does our standard of good come from?” And you can’t explain the existence of this objective eternal standard of good written on our hearts without introducing God into the picture, because again, if atheism is true, all our thinking processes, including our moral judgments, are simply an accidental byproduct of non-rational physical and chemical events, to which we can attach no ultimate significance. So these were the great arguments that destroyed my atheism, more or less in three chapters in Miracles, and then he goes on to argue that, well if God exists and is the creator of the universe, then clearly He can suspend the laws of nature that are His creation in the first place, just as an author, and introduce miracles, just as an author can change the ending of a book and a composer can change a note in a symphony, so if one should acknowledge the existence of God, all my objections to miracles and the supernatural collapsed, and then I could begin to look at the gospel stories and the story of Jesus with an open mind and not simply rejecting it because it introduced the miraculous. So those were some of the arguments that really put me on the road to Christ. So your perceived foundation in atheism, it sounds like, was crumbling, one argument at a time, so these obstacles were being brought down, so that it gave you an openness to pursue whatever Christianity was. So how did you pursue what that was? Did you read the Bible? How did you kind of figure that out? Well, I didn’t read the Bible. I mean I was familiar with the basic story of Jesus. Well, and of course Lewis talks a lot about a lot of the truths, the stories, the claims made in the Gospels about Jesus and His divinity were discussed by Lewis in his book Miracles. So for example he says that the idea that you can’t trust the gospel writers because they were ignorant of the laws of nature, and so they believed in things like a virgin birth. And he knocked that argument on the head by saying they might not understand modern physics and chemistry, but they knew perfectly well that babies aren’t born unless a husband and a wife come together sexually, and Joseph knew that as well as we do, which is why he was minded to put Mary away when he discovered that she was pregnant with Jesus. So a lot of the arguments that people have about the truthfulness of the gospel stories in the New Testament were already being discussed by Lewis in Miracles, so I didn’t need to read the Bible, but I did read… I was interested in the whole issue about what evidence was there for the resurrection of Jesus, and so I read a book called Who Moved the Stone?, a famous classic I’m sure that you’ve heard of, Americans have heard of, Who Moved the Stone?, which discusses—which was published in the 1930s, I think—where the argument of that author. I can’t remember the name of the author for the moment, but anyway, the great argument, of course, of the empty tomb. Jesus is crucified, he’s put into the tomb, a guard of soldiers is put on that tomb, and then a few days later, there’s no body in the tomb. And how do you explain that, other than by the resurrection. And so, you know, if the Jewish leaders and Pilate and the Roman leaders had wanted to discredit Christianity, as they had every reason for wanting to do, politically and religiously, all they had to do was to point to the body of Jesus in the tomb, but they couldn’t do that. And why couldn’t they do that? And how is it that Christianity takes off in a big way in Jerusalem 40 days or so after the crucifixion, with 3,000 people coming to Christ as a result of Peter’s first great sermon that we read about in the book of Acts. How could that happen in the city where He was crucified, where thousands of people knew exactly what had happened to Jesus, if the tomb wasn’t empty and there wasn’t good evidence for the existence of the risen Christ? So as I started to look at the historical evidence for the existence and the claims of Jesus and the truthfulness of the gospel writers and of the early disciples, I began to see that the evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity was overwhelming, not least the evidence that we have from St. Paul. I mean here is a man who is persecuting the early church, convinced that they’re liars, that Jesus is not God, and then he has this famous experience of seeing Jesus on the road to Damascus, and he turns over 180 degrees and becomes the greatest preacher of the early church, and both he and the other apostles were prepared to lead lives that involved suffering and ended in martyrdom, and would they have done that for something that they knew to be a lie? What was it that explained the total transformation and the character of the disciples, who went from being terrified of the Roman and Jewish authorities to being heroic missionaries for the Christian faith, and likewise how do you explain the conversion of St. Paul. And then, of course, later on I read in the book of Acts and in the epistles that Paul refers to 500 witnesses to the risen Christ, and some of these people are still alive if you want to check my story with them. So when I began to look at the evidence, the historical evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity, I was overwhelmed. That’s quite a paradigm shift. So you were moving through this evidence, and during this time obviously you were still dating Rachael and trying to figure out things relationally. Do you… I can see a skeptic saying your emotional involvement with a girl that you loved was skewing your perspective on how you were viewing the evidence. If someone accused you of that, how would you respond? Well, I would respond that, on the contrary, the fact that I was in love with a Christian girl simply counterbalanced, in equal measure, all the emotional prejudices I had against Christianity. And one powerful force that was hindering my open-mindedness and, as it were, countering my progress along the road to Christ, was the worry of what would my family and what would non-Christian friends of mine think of me if I embraced Christianity? I was embarrassed and anxious about how other people would think of me because I still had this feeling, this purely emotional prejudice from the past that it wasn’t cool to be a Christian. It would make people think you were intellectually second rate. And it was just embarrassing. It took me a long time to admit to my mother that I was a Christian. So really my love for Rachael simply counterbalanced, in more or less equal measure, the other reasons, other emotional influences on me not to accept Christianity. Also, I have to say Rachael took me to an Anglican service, communion service, in her local church, and we were both living in London, at opposite ends of London, and she took me to one of the services, and it was a communion service, and I’d never had communion. I’d never been to a communion service, and I was shocked by the liturgy. You know, “This is My body, broken for you. Take, eat. This is my blood. Drink it.” And I thought, “This is cannibalism.” I was really, really shocked by the liturgy of communion. And the other thing I didn’t like about that particular church service—and what I didn’t like about liturgy. It was the sense that I thought it was a bit like the Moonies, with chanting stuff, which is kind of a form of brainwashing. So I didn’t like going to church, and I didn’t like the idea of reading your Bible every day. I thought that was a kind of irksome and rather embarrassing habit. So I had plenty of emotional reasons influencing my approach, my journey, so really it was a kind of… By God’s grace, if you like, the fact that Rachael was in my life simply created the opportunity… made me set out on a journey of discovery, of exploration, which I would never otherwise have done. And it just counterbalanced, in equal measure, all the influences on me not to do that, so I was kind of caught between two equal and opposite forces, which is where the prayer comes in that people were praying for me. Because as we know, those of us who’ve made the journey and come to discover God and become Christians, there’s a spiritual battle. There is a supernatural force of evil. There is such a thing as Satan, who tries to stop people coming to the God he hates. So that would be my answer, really. And also I would challenge… I’d say, “Look, forget about what you think are the reasons… what you think about my emotions or not. Look at the evidence for yourself.” I would challenge them to look at the evidence. There’s good historical evidence for the existence of Jesus from non-Christian sources like the Roman historians, Tacitus and Suetonius, and a Jewish historian, Josephus, so no serious historian doubts the existence of Jesus or that He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. So how do you explain the growth of the church? Why should the church spring up led by people who made this extraordinary claim that their God was somebody who hung on a Roman cross and then was resurrected? I mean it’s the most amazing statement for anyone to have ever made in the history of the world. How could they possibly have got away with it if it wasn’t true? So I would just try and turn the tables and challenge them about their assumptions and about their emotional hangups about God which might obscure their ability to recognize rational evidence. So I’d kind of take the fight back to them, hopefully in a sympathetic way. Yes. Wow. You were becoming intellectually convinced. You were somewhat conflicted emotionally, but you were becoming intellectually convinced, but I know Christianity and accepting Christianity as true doesn’t necessarily make you a Christian or even want to be a Christian. So what was it that was next in your journey? I hadn’t prayed to God beforehand, and I just prayed to Jesus, and I said, “If you’re real, come into my life and sort out this mess,” this inner conflict, which, at a key moment, I couldn’t resolve, and I had perfect peace about it somehow after that time of prayer, and then I was with a Christian friend afterwards, and I explained I had a bit of a hangup about the cross. I wasn’t quite sure. There were moments when I understood what the cross was about and the atonement, and then there were moments when it seemed a veil came in front of my eyes and I couldn’t quite grasp it anymore, and so I was kind of blocked, and anyway, he started talking to me about the veil in the temple of the high priest being torn in two when Jesus died on the cross, giving access to God, and as he said that, a kind of understanding of what the atonement and the cross was about just fell into my head. “Oh, yes,” I said. “What you find on the cross is the reconciliation of God’s justice with His mercy because sin separates us from God and therefore has to be… The penalty of sin has to be paid. God pays it through Christ in our stead and enables us to then have a new relationship with God,” so the penalty, the justice, God’s justice is satisfied by Jesus’s death on the cross as a representative of the human race, but at the same time, because He’s God and can conquer death, His mercy is released into our lives, and we are able to have a relationship with God, and that’s, of course, what the resurrection is all about, that Jesus conquers death on our behalf, pays the penalty of sin and conquers death, so I understood all that, certainly, in a way which, funnily enough, didn’t involve quite the same sort of reasoning that my friend was using at that time. It was a kind of separate, alternative explanation, parallel explanation to the one he was giving, but it just kind of literally fell into my head, and then I just had this experience of… It was like falling in love again but much more powerfully, and so I caught a taxi home in a sort of daze, realizing I had now become a Christian. So there was this kind of spiritual struggle, and I’m sure the prayers of Rachael and her friends made a difference. So there were two things. There was a spiritual struggling on for my will and my understanding and this intellectual journey through following the footsteps of C.S. Lewis. So the two kind of came together at that moment, and there I was, becoming a Christian in last days of summer of 1976. And you received a sense of peace. Yes. Total peace. And I presume that peace has remained, in a sense, and that the pieces came together, that everything started to make sense to you, intellectually, spiritually, emotionally things were resolving. Yes. That’s quite right, Jana, and then, of course, I began to read the Bible properly for the first time, really seriously, and that began to make sense. And yes, I mean I’ve had lots of ups and downs in life since becoming a Christian, as we all do, but I’ve never for one moment doubted the existence and goodness of God. I mean I get angry with God sometimes when things don’t work out the way I’d like and when there are unexplained trials and sufferings or friends I love die seemingly prematurely and for no good reason, so one goes on… I think as a Christian, you go on wrestling with God, but once you have met Him, once you’ve had an encounter with Him and you know that He’s real, you know then that… Life then moves on to a different level. You’ve now got a personal relationship with your Creator and Savior, and you know you’re challenged to trust the one who created you and who died for you and who, because He knows the end from the beginning and created our very ability to think and reason, must always know better than we do, and so we must trust him, even when we’re sort of in the dark and we don’t understand why certain things are happening in our lives. We need to trust His sovereignty and His goodness. That’s where faith comes in. That’s what faith is about. It never involves a leap in the dark with evidence. Once you know that God is real and you have a personal relationship with Him, then you have to learn to trust Him. And that’s what life’s about, really. Wow, that’s really quite beautiful. Such a transformation from where you began. I’m curious. You were concerned about the perception of your family and friends after you became a Christian. How did that resolve? Well, my mother… I gave her a copy of my book on Lewis, which is a very evangelistic book. I sent her essays and lectures that Lewis had given. And so I did witness to her. We did witness to her, including the evidence for the resurrection. And I think the situation we got to was… And also she met some of our Christian friends, some of whom are very impressive. Well, they’re all impressive, but one in particular made an impact on her. And I think she certainly respected our faith. She said to me early on, “You must think for yourself and follow what you think is true, and I respect that.” And I think we’d got to the position not long before she passed away that she, I think in her heart of hearts, was beginning to realize that actually all this stuff is true, but she wasn’t going to admit it, but I believe that, before she passed away, she did, in her heart of hearts, believe in God. I just have reasons for believing that which… It’s too personal. I can’t really share it. But I’m quite sure she’s with God. Well, my father had passed long, long before, when I was 17. Other family members are not Christians, and I go on praying for them. Yeah. So I’m encouraged by the fact that Jesus had problems with His human family, and a lot of Christians are in that position, aren’t we? We have relatives we love and value who haven’t yet made the journey we’ve made, so we keep praying for them. So I would say to any Christians who have unbelieving relatives, “Just keep praying for them. Keep loving them and keep praying for them. And believe in the power of prayer.” So yeah. So that’s where I am, really. And so if there are those, Philip, who are listening today who might be curious. They’ve been inspired or challenged by your own story of atheism, especially as an extremely brilliant man. It does challenge the stereotypes of Christians as nonintellectual or anti-intellectual kinds of people. I wonder what you might say to them. Well, I’d say to any atheist, any unbeliever, I’d say, “Look, do you care about truth? Are you willing to ask yourself, ‘Is there good evidence—philosophical arguments, historical arguments, scientific arguments—for the existence of an intelligent and rational and good Creator God? And is there historical evidence for the existence of Jesus and the truthfulness of the Gospels and the stories they tell about Jesus? And is there good evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus that suggests that actually He is divine?'” So I would say to them, “If you care about truth, then why not go on a journey of discovery? Why not try to find out whether there is any evidence for the beliefs that I hold and other Christians hold?” And I would say to them, “It’s a big question, isn’t it? Whether we’re just accidental byproducts of an ultimately meaningless universe, and all we have to look forward to are our years in this life, followed by death and oblivion, or whether there actually is a creator and there is such a thing as the supernatural and there is such a thing as eternity and are we going to be with God in eternity or are we going to be eternally separated from the source of all life and truth and goodness and beauty and so forth? It’s a really important issue.” And I would suggest that they might try reading C.S. Lewis, try reading Mere Christianity, which is his radio broadcasts, which were addressed to a general audience during the Second World War, and starts off with, “What is the evidence for the existence of God?” I would suggest that they read C.S. Lewis if he might be a thinker who could help them. And I would recommend other books. There’s a book called, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek. That’s quite a good book to read, where these are two Christian philosophers and scientists and theologians who set forth the arguments and the evidence for the existence of God and the truthfulness of the gospels, and there are lots of other books along the same lines. There’s another book by a British scientist and mathematician called Dr. John Lennox called God’s Undertaker, where he looks at the scientific evidence for the existence of God. So I would just challenge them to do that and to visit websites like bethinking.org, the website of the Oxford-based universities and colleges Christians fellowship, based in Oxford, where there’s lots of material on these issues and equivalents in America. Well, I would just challenge them to go on a journey of discovery. “And if you don’t find the arguments and the evidence convincing, okay, that’s fine. At least you made the effort to try and see what is the truth.” So that’s what I would say to them. Go on a journey. Oh, and the other thing I’d mention is the example of Lee Strobel. Lee Strobel used to be… I think he was the law editor or law correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and an investigative journalist with an excellent mind. I think he got a law degree from Yale, and he didn’t believe in God until his wife had a conversion experience and became a Christian, and so he set out on a journey of discovery and has produced these books, The Case for the Creator, The Case for Christ, where he describes all the interviews he had with theologians and scientists and philosophers when he was making his journey of discovery, and he became a Christian. And in fact there’s been a film that’s been made about his life, his journey to Christianity, so there’s lots of material out there for those who care about the search for truth and are willing to embark on it, so that would be my challenge. If you believe in truth, put it to the test. Put Christianity and belief in God to the test, and with an open mind, try and see whether there’s any good evidence. That would be my invitation and my challenge. That’s excellent. And as far as Christians, if you had a word to say for them or to them, I know you mentioned to keep praying and to keep loving, and I also am reminded of what you thought when you saw those Christians in the coffeehouse. You described them as being rather lovely and that there was a beauty to them. I wondered if you could speak to the Christian. Well, yes. I would say, “Dear brother and sister, first of all, don’t despair. The Word of God says that the prayer of a righteous man or woman has great power and achieves wonderful results, so that’s a promise, and we’re righteous through the blood of Jesus, so that’s a promise that you can stand upon in prayer. So pray. Just pray by name for your loved ones.” I also include them when I pray The Lord’s Prayer. You know, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Well, I often pray, “Well, Lord, Your kingdom come, Your will be done in the lives of those I love and care about who don’t yet know you.” That’s a powerful prayer because it’s part of The Lord’s Prayer and that the prayer of Jesus, the prayer of God the Son Incarnate, so that prayer, the whole of The Lord’s Prayer has great power, so the first and most important thing I would say to my fellow Christians, to my fellow believers, is to believe in the power of prayer. It’s an incredible weapon of warfare, of spiritual warfare, that God has given us, that the enemy does everything in his power to make us disbelieve in. And he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t recognize the power of prayer, so I give you that thought. So pray, pray, pray. Every day, pray for those you love who don’t yet know the Lord. Just pray for each one of them by name and claim their salvation. Jesus has paid the ransom price for them, so claim them. And never despair. And be good at listening. Listen. Try and find out what makes them tick and why they have the views that they have. And then pray into that. You won’t necessarily achieve a great deal by arguing with them. I find arguing with relatives is not an easy thing to do. But don’t be discouraged if you find that arguing with them doesn’t seem to get anywhere but pray for them and pray that God would bring other people into their lives, experiences into their lives, books, whatever, that might speak to them. And the Holy Spirit knows them and loves them and knows how to reach them. God knows how to reach them. So just pray. Listen, love, and pray. And obviously, if you do have relatives or friends or loved ones who are open-minded and prepared to engage or to listen to arguments and read books and so on, well then lend them books and send them tapes or links to good websites where there are other testimonies. So I think actually sending people links to good testimonies that might influence them is another good thing to do. So there it is. That’s just a few thoughts that I would share. That’s wonderful. And hopefully this podcast will be a good resource for those stories, those testimonies, yours being a beautiful one. And if I could co-opt the English word, your testimony is just quite lovely. But yet incredibly profound and very, very substantive. So, Philip, I appreciate so much your being on the podcast today and taking us on your investigative journey, your journey of discovery to the one who made you. It’s obviously made a big difference in your life, and I do pray that it will make a difference in the lives of those who are actually listening. So thank you so much for coming on. Well, thank you for having me, Jana. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Philip’s story. You can find out more about Philip by visiting his website at bethinking.org. I’ve included that in the episode notes for your reference. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If so, 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.