eX-skeptic

Former atheist Warren Prehmus thought he had all that life had to offer until a turn of events sparked reconsideration of what might be missing. But, the answers were not coming from a place or position that he wanted to believe. Warren found himself in a dilemma of need and belief. Someone who had no need for God realizes perhaps, well, that he does. Not merely because of his own need, but because it was true and provided the most satisfying answers for his questions and his life. Email Us: info@sidebstories.com www.cslewisinstitute.org Episode Transcript JH: 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. In my research with 52 former atheists, one-third of them simply felt that they had no need for God.  They enjoyed making their own decisions, living like freely without moral constraint.  They appreciated atheism’s intellectual standing within science and the university.  Their lives were generally full and happy.  They didn’t see themselves as people who needed religion as a social or emotional crutch to get them by in life.  Rather, they were strong, independent, courageous in answering life’s biggest questions. When life is going well, life without God works well.  When life throws a curveball – which inevitably happens to everyone – it can cause you to step back and reconsider your options your perspectives to see if they hold up, to see if they adequately address your questions.  When solid answers come, you learn to accept and deal with the issues at hand.  When answers seem dissatisfying, it can open you to other ways of thinking about the world, about your life, to become willing to see another point of view. Answers can start to become clear but they may not be coming from a place or position that you want to believe.   What happens then? In our story today – that’s the dilemma our former atheist faced.  Someone who had no need for God realizes perhaps, well, that he does.  Not merely because of his own need, but because it was true and provided the most satisfying answers for his questions and his life.  Warren Prehmus was a former atheist but is now a Christian.  He is a successful business owner, father, and family man. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know his daughters Courtney and Sarah, both brilliant and beautiful.  And, if they are any reflection of him, which I believe they are, it is an indication that he has done something very right in his life. JH: Welcome to The Side B Podcast, Warren! WP: thanks glad to be here. JH:  As we’re getting started Warren, Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself ? WP:  Sure.  I live in Atlanta and have a small business that’s a wealth management company with four partners including my son.  So I have three children. My son is about to get married.  The other two are married and each have 3 children and I have six grandchildren.  I have all my life been an athlete and I still play basketball in my 60s and tennis and golf and I’m a fisherman so those are the things I spend my time doing when I’m not working at the company or playing with grandkids. JH:  Fantastic!  I guess the beautiful thing about all of those sports is that you can still be outside and still enjoy them. I know for my husband, his golf game has gotten a lot better during the coronavirus for some reason because it’s an outdoor activities or something he’s been able to do. So I guess you’ve been able to still enjoy your sports. WP:  Yes.  Golf and tennis from particular have been very popular.  Basketball, however, is kind of on the outs.  No one’s playing basketball but I tell people that if we start and you’ve got to do social distancing and stay 6 feet away from me.  I’m going to score a lot of points. Yeah, that would be a good way to play basketball certainly, for sure. JH:  Well, let’s get started with your story.  I’m so excited that you’re here today and I want to hear all about it but we want to start really at the beginning.  I want to really understand where your atheism was formed, the context in which you grew up.  So why don’t we just start there at the beginning and your childhood. Tell me a little bit about kind of the community and culture where you grew up.  Was it religious at all?  Was it urban?  Was it rural?  Tell me a little bit about that. WP:  Sure. I grew up in upstate New York out in the country about 5 miles outside of a small town of Scotia, NY and my dad was an engineer at GE.  So as I was growing up, you know, my dad taught me good there is no God.  God is for weak people that need a crutch and we’re strong we don’t we don’t need crutches.  I loved my dad and my dad was actually was a very good dad, a very good father and so I bought into that fully.  And it kind of gives you a prideful thing knowing that you’re strong while others are weak. For instance, in the second grade when we had Christmas carols where all the parents file into the cafeteria and all the kids get up on stage and sing Christmas carols for the parents.  When the religious songs were singing, I had to get down and walk down from the stands and go behind the curtain because I was not allowed to sing the religious songs.  Singing about Santa Claus and Rudolph I could sing those.  I sang those songs but if it was about Away in the Manger, I was not to sing.  So I was definitely a little different than the other children in my little school. There was one family down the street that were Christians and they were a lot of my best friends and I played with them all the time and really liked them.  But yeah, it was too bad that they had to believe in God. So, we did go to church to the Unitarian church and the Unitarian preacher pastor whatever they call him there he gave my father a saying that my father really liked.  He told my father “I’m not an atheist. I’m an agnostic with atheistic leanings.”  So my dad really liked that and so I really liked that too.  When I was in the 4th grade, my brother and I rebelled against the Unitarian church and I tell people is because we felt it was too conservative for us.  So it was it was Sunday morning and my mother was getting dressed and everyone’s getting ready for church my brother and I ran up in the woods and hid and my mother came out and yelled for us and we’d never came back until an hour later.  And so after that we never went to church.  That was our way of going obviously just as a curiosity. JH:  Why did you go to the Unitarian church if you or your family or your father were really pushing against religion or religious things at that time? That’s a little bit curious for me. WP:  Well I mean Unitarians, you can basically believe whatever you want to as long as it’s not Christian.  At least that was my impression of it. And it was more of a social thing for them. They enjoyed those people because those people were mostly atheists and but they enjoyed doing the function of church for the social reasons and hearing the preacher preach about social causes and complaining about Christians. JH: OK, well that makes sense.  They were just wanting some community and there was a way to do it. Let me ask you too about that family down the street, that family there were Christians. Was there anything about that family that was attractive to you?  Did their faith in any way seem to inform their lives? WP:  It definitely informed their lives and I knew that dad took a real interest in me.  I could tell he really loved me and there weren’t many other dads like that so that was impactful.  I’m still in touch with the that family.  I was on the phone last night with one of the boys.  There were four boys in that family.  One of them is a pastor up in upstate New York near where we grew up. I’m still in touch with him and I really give him a lot of credit for praying me into the Kingdom because I know he did. JH:  Wow. That speaks very highly of him to have been that part of your life for that long. WP:  He was three years older than me and he kind of took me under his wing. JH: You had this Christian father down the street and you had a father who was agnostic with atheistic leanings.  I find it a little bit curious to have a father who at that time and even American culture who was atheist. Was there something that informed his atheism because he seemed to have a pretty strong resistance against religion to not even allow you to sing songs that were religious in nature. WP:  Yeah I can’t tell you for sure how he came to his beliefs but I do know that when he grew up on Long Island when he was four his father left the home to go live with his girlfriend in New York City. And he only saw him once ever again.  And you know a lot of people get their view of God by their view of their father and his father was not there.  In addition when his dad left, his mom moved in with her two boys into grandma’s house and when grandma add died, the church took over the house because apparently the grandma had willed the house to the church and they kicked my grandmother and my father out with their and his brother.  And so their view of the church was very negative because they had kicked him out of their house.  That’s how he viewed it . JH:  I can I can appreciate why he might have pushed back against God that considering his father and the way that the church treated his own family.  I can see why he would want nothing to do with it ‘so thank you.  I think that brings some clarity really to the context of your story.  Now going back to growing up –  You said that sports was a very important part of your life.  I would imagine that that occupied you growing up.  You were athletic. I think probably were you athletic from a young age. WP:  Yes I mean sports was really important to me.  Basketball in particular kind of took over in junior high and then I was you know a really good high school basketball player and I got a scholarship to play in college.  That’s what I loved to do and put all my passion and energy towards it. JH: It sounds like you had a real full life, that it was a good life and you really had no need for God growing up that just wasn’t something that was a part of your life. WP:  Only if he could help me get better.  The only reason I would have needed him. JH:  It sounds like you were pretty good on your own. WP:  I did have a good career. JH:  Did you go ahead and play basketball in college or University level? WP: Yeah I played at the University of Vermont. I had a scholarship to play there and was a starter for four years.  I ended up as the all-time leading scorer at the University so yeah I played a lot of basketball. JH:  That’s quite impressive – all-time leading scorer!  Wow!  So your life was going as just as well as it could be without God.  There was really no need.  So tell me then, what changed in your life as you are continuing along in the journey.  What happened next after you got out of college? WP:  First thing that happened is in college I had college roommate for four years who was also on the basketball team and we were best buddies and until about halfway through.  He got hooked in with the Campus Crusaders and he became a Christian. He stopped running with me and our friends and he started hanging out with his Christian friends and it irritated me quite a bit.  We stayed roommates and we were cordial to each other and were friends but that had put up pretty serious divide between us.  So that happened. And then I met my wife in college and we got married two years out of college and then everything like you said everything was going well in my life.  I got a job with GE was doing well in my career and had no need for God.  And then my wife got pregnant and at 6 1/2 months along we found out we were having twins and that was very exciting for us for me.  And I was about to become the most naive parent in history I think.  And then two days after we found out we’re having twins I got a call in the office and had to rush home in a snowstorm and rushed her to the hospital in in the snow storm with her in the back of my hatchback yelling, “I’m having a baby!” driving to the emergency room.  And the first of the twins was born you know 5 minutes after we got there and then the second one shortly after that.  Ao that was a hugely emotional time and they those babies lived for a day and they died. JH: Oh goodness. I’m so sorry. WP:  From the excitement of having twins to the pain that they died.  We were very well taken care of by that hospital in New Jersey.  They helped us to start the grieving process and it changed my wife’s heart.  She was not an atheist.  She had always gone to church and she loved church.  She didn’t go to church when we were first married but she loved Bible stories and so forth.  But at her church she never heard the gospel. This emotional event turned her heart so that she wanted God.  And so shortly after that she joined Bible Study Fellowship, started reading the Bible and all this.  In fact during our grieving time, she kept saying that this is happened for a reason.  And I hung on to that because it felt good to think that there was a reason.  But if you’re an atheist, there is no reason that things happen. So she started going to Bible Study Fellowship and I started getting hungrier just trying to figure out what’s the truth again. I knew some Christians.  I knew some Jewish people. I knew some Muslims. I knew some Mormons and I had figured out that they couldn’t all be true. And, I was an atheist so I mean I just there was a hunger to figure out what the truth was.   So I started reading books on comparative religions which was kind of a waste of time in retrospect because they weren’t written from a Christian perspective.  But, I started reading lots of other things.  The first books I ever read that mentioned Jesus in any kind of positive light were Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuler with the positive thinking books.  And looking back their theology may not have been that great, but it was something for me to read where Jesus was not a cuss word. JH:  Your wife is obviously pursuing her faith perhaps that she had laid down for a while and trying to make sense of this tragedy in your life.  And she started opening the Bible and reading the Bible.  Now it sounds like there were some kind of curiosity for you about it in pursuing the truth.  How did you feel when your wife started pursuing these things as an atheist? WP:  It was fine. She could do that.  That’s fine whatever she does but I’m going to pursue my own path.  I had a lot of pride and so I wasn’t paying much attention to what she was doing, honestly.  I had my own internal struggle going on. JH:  You said that there was something kind of birthed in you that wanted to know what was true.  Is that what was the struggle or can you describe that?  Did it have something to do with pride? WP:  Well my pride was holding me back.  My struggle was to find out what the truth was because there’s got to be something more.   And it was, looking back, it was God just drawing me little by little towards him.  So I had run across some Christians that witnessed to me and they were people I respected.  And I listened to what they had to say without fighting back too hard.  But, my dad was a scientist, an evolutionist and very well read and I had bought and fully into that.  I was in science in school. I was a physics major and so all this God stuff was fine but you know evolution is a fact.  And so that really was something that I hung on to strongly.  So there was a sense of ‘religion is not factual, just blind faith or story as compared to science which is a fact. JH:  There seemed to be some kind of irreconcilability between science and belief in God in your mind at that point? WP:  Yeah, it’s basically has proven that stuff is not true.  Science has proven that certainly the Bible is not true and probably there’s no God because of science. JH:  So you were wrestling with that? WP:  Yeah but I started reading a lot of books and I got into some better, theologically better books.  And we had moved to Atlanta after the twins had died and we were living here for a year and a half or two years or so.  And, as I was going through this struggle my wife said, you know we’re in the South kind of like the Bible belt now.  We need to have a church home.  And so I thought, ‘Well that’s probably a good idea.’  So we started out to try to find a church which you think about it – an atheist and maybe perhaps a baby Christian going to try to find a church – that would be an interesting thing. JH:  That would be that would be an interesting thing, but you were both basically going to support her I presume. WP:  Going to lead her, ah yeah, ‘follow me honey. I’ll find us a good church.’ OK that’s an interesting question for an atheist.  Yes well some of these self-help books I had read had talked about the man being the leader of the family and so that that was what I was kind of following with that. JH: OK so did you find a church home?  Did you lead her? WP:  I did. We went to several churches and we would leave and I said, ‘Well we’re not going back there.  That preacher didn’t even believe what he was talking about.’  I might have been right on some of those it seems, like I don’t know.  We did go to one church, the local Baptist Church, with a preacher, I really liked him.  I had known him personally outside of church but they did this terrible awful thing there at the Baptist Church.  At the end of the service they sang the song and they did an altar call and that was very difficult for an atheist.  And he had said something during service that I remember to this day which was ‘When the hounds of heaven get on your trail, there’s no getting him off.’  And I felt like that’s speaking to me.  And so we didn’t go back to that church because of the altar call. And finally my wife heard about a church that you could go to this class they had that taught you what the church believed and what other churches believed.  And he didn’t have to join the church to go to this class it was something called an Inquirers Class and the church was Perimeter Church.  So we decided we go to that class.  We’ve never been to the church and we went to the class and it was Randy Pope was the pastor and the class it was a classroom. It was kind of tight there.  Everyone is was shoulder to shoulder, sitting in these little desk chairs.  And the first thing they did was hand out this form.  You wrote your name and then the first question was ‘Are you a Christian? yes or no.’  And I didn’t want to fill that out because you could read everybody else’s paper, so very awkward. So I put my arm across the question and put a question mark move my remove put a question mark there and then covered it up and filled out the rest of the form.  And then you’re supposed to pass your paper down the row to collect them.  And so mine was folded up. Everyone else’s was open and it was just really awkward.  That’s where I got introduced to Randy Pope an I really liked him and I knew he believed what he was talking about.  And so I didn’t even meet him directly that day, but I connected with him. And from there we didn’t continue going to that classroom.  We did start going to church periodically and the church was pretty small back then.  Randy used to have the habit of he’d preach and then he’d go to the door and greet people as they would leave.  And so I went to church and we were leaving and he shook my hand and I told him my name and he said, ‘Oh I’ve been meaning to get with you.’  And I knew why.  He had seen the question mark, you know right? And so he said he was in the process of putting together these four booklets to help businessmen to understand what it means to be a Christian and would I be willing to meet with him? And so in my arrogance I thought, ‘Well I could probably help him out and I agreed to meet with him. And so we started meeting at one of these inexpensive steak houses we’d go to.  And the first week he gave me an assignment.  I can’t believe that somebody just meet you for lunch and they give you an assignment, okay, and it’s to read the 1st three chapters in the book of John.   Well, I had never read the Bible at all.  I never had even touched a Bible and I didn’t want to, but he gave me this assignment.  And so I didn’t want to let him down because I really liked him.  I thought he was a very interesting going places guy and so I picked up, finally with great difficulty, picked up the book.  It was like it was poison or something, but finally I picked it up and I started reading the book of John and I couldn’t stop. So I read the whole book of John that week and went to meet with Randy the second week.   and he said, ‘Well did he do your assignment?’ and I said ‘Well, I read the whole book of John.’ He said, ‘Oh, you were only supposed to read the 1st three chapters.’ JH: I’m curious, in reading the Bible for the first time obviously you didn’t want to but then you did.  How did it meet with your expectations?  It must have obviously surprised you and intrigued you to have read more than three chapters.  This was in the book of John, the story of Jesus, right? WP:  Yeah and there is there was something in there that was gripping me but I was fighting that.  That gripping was fighting against my pride of not believing that there was a God or that this could be true.  So as it was kind of a battle going on inside of me there, but I did read it hungrily. JH: I wonder what you thought of the person of Jesus?  Reading his biography for the first time, was he like or unlike what you expected or who you expected? WP:  Well, I didn’t really know most of the stories.  Now, this was all new to me and it was like ‘Well this is fantastic.’  Not in a ‘Oh, that’s great’ but it’s just ‘That could that really have happened’ and ‘That’s just so unlikely to have happened’ that I was looking at it from the outside knowing that this kind of thing does not happen.  And so, that’s how I looked at Jesus. JH: I guess the miracles that he was perhaps working or the claims that he was making especially, I guess as a scientist, it probably didn’t fit with your view of the world? WP:  That’s right, yeah.  Those things cannot happen.  That was my view but there was something really drawing me with reading those pages. JH: Did it have any ring of truth to it at all or was it just like a fairy tale a good story that was incredibly intriguing and gripping? WP:  I would say more a good story that was intriguing and gripping but this can’t be true.  That was my feeling at the time.  I began and part of me wanted it and part of me didn’t so then we kept on meeting and the last week the assignment was to pray to receive Christ.  And I told him, ‘I’m not ready’ and just ‘If there’s no God, this is just the story and I’m not going to put my faith and trust in something that’s just a story.’  So he said, ‘Okay, well, we’re done.  We’re not going to meet anymore unless something else changes.’ We started going we go to church periodically and then months later I picked up a book that my probably atheist sister had given me called Mere Christianity, a book you might have heard of. JH: Yes, I have for sure! WP:  Well, when she gave me the book she said, ‘You might want to read this book. It might make me you believe in God.’  And remember, she said that to me and I had that.  It was months and months before that, maybe years.  So I picked up that book one night and started reading it.  And it was in February in winter time and I was lying on the couch all by myself reading this book.  And CS Lewis takes you through the proofs for the existence of God and that was something that I had never heard.  And he started making sense to me. And so I put the book down just to think about it and this thought came in my head that I didn’t put there.  It just kind of came in and said, ‘I’m a sinner.’  And I knew that that was the first step of the four step sinner’s prayer and that was a dangerous thought.  And so, from the other side came this other thought and said, ‘Think about that later.  Put it off.  Think about it later.’ But it came back.  ‘I’m a sinner.’  ‘Think about it later.’  And finally, I felt like I was hanging on to something with all my might and finally just let go and I went ahead and said ‘what I’d been taught with the sinner’s prayer, which was ‘I believe I’m a Sinner and I deserve to go to hell and then Jesus died for my sins and I now trust you with my life.’ I went back to reading the book but I knew that that was significant something had changed right there.  I had too much pride to tell my wife about it, but like I said it’s February. We usually keep the house real cool and went to bed not too long after that.  And we usually bundle up all pile up the blankets.  And so, I was lying there as we got in bed with nothing covering me and I was sweating and she was all bundled up under the blankets and she leaned over looked to me and said, ‘What’s the matter with you? Must be the Holy Spirit!’  And again, I had too much pride to talk about it but I thought to myself, ‘Wow I’m going to remember that she said that.’ Yes and it so the next day, I called Randy and said, ‘Randy we need to get together for lunch.’  And he said, ‘How about a week from Thursday?’ And I said, ‘Randy, it’s got to be sooner than that.’  He said, ‘Oh, how about today?’  And so, we met that day and with great difficulty I shared with him what had gone on.  And he said, ‘Well, that sounds like it’s real, but time will tell.’  So he was a bit skeptical. I don’t know if he was skeptical or I think he saw because I had tears when I was telling the story.   So it wasn’t like I was faking and I know he had seen a change, but I think it was very wise on his part because what that said to me was ‘You better check that this is real’ and I think it really helped me too, to put a nail in it to say, ‘Yes, this is real.’  So it took about 2 weeks for me to be able to share with my wife, maybe a week or two weeks to be able to share with my wife what happened just because I had so much pride. JH:  I bet she was surprised! WP:  Sprobably was but she’s a pretty discerning person and she probably saw things changing.  The people who were surprised wer my college roommate when I called him and the boys down the street that were Christians when I was a kid.  They had been praying for me most of my life, yeah, most of my life.  We had some very joyous calls. JH:  I think for them it probably really confirmed the value of prayer and never giving up on it.  Really the prayer for another person, that sometimes you can see fruit bear many years later. So it sounds like in your story Warren,  you had a lot of things kind of coming together.  Of course you were sparked towards this journey by personal tragedy and then your wife’s pursuit of God, but you still had those questions.  But somehow those intellectual questions of God’s existence were answered through CS Lewis and the hounds of heaven who was actually seeking you, and that the Bible reading the Bible seemed to be a pivotal part of your story.  All of those things were coming together so that your willingness changed to see and to find something that you were missing.  What a beautiful story of everything kind of coming together over a process, over a period of time.  And even though the hounds of heaven were pursuing you, there was a patience there, it seems like as well, to allow you to journey at your own pace – even from the preacher to tell that you needed your own time and space to work through some things. WP:  I think that what actually occurred figures not patience on my part but on other people’s parts.  I did not want it.  I did not want this to be true and fought it with everything I had.  But I ran out of gas shortly after that, yeah. I was so very excited about my new faith and I wanted to tell my family and I got blasted pretty good and it didn’t go well.   And the big thing was evolution and I didn’t know anything about creation science, any of that.  But, by golly, I was going to learn. And so, I finally got some books that talked about how creation is scientific and how evolution is a fraud, and that changed all that.  That was another big change for me that really solidified my faith because evolution and Christianity don’t go together in my view. So after I was meeting with the pastor, I started reading lots of books and one of them that really impacted me was a book that as an atheist I read called The Battle for the Mind by a guy named Tim LaHay.  It was written in the early 80s and it talked about secular humanism.  And it talked about the fruits of secular humanism versus the fruits of Christianity.  And I read that and I thought that’s probably true.  And I did not like the fruits of what I believed and it was very difficult for me to reconcile that at that time.  Then actually there was a pain there was in my chest, tightness in my chest that didn’t go away until the day that I finally submitted. JH: So when you say there was a tightness in your chest because of the what you were reading in terms of the implications of humanism and atheism, that it was so disturbing to you that you actually felt a physical pain? WP:  Yeah, I actually felt the physical pain.  It wasn’t a huge pain but it was just a little nagging thing that I didn’t even think about it but I noticed that after I become a Christian it was gone and never come back. JH:  That’s fascinating!  As we as we are coming to a close, I wondered since you’ve been on both sides of the story, you know what it means to feel like and to think like an atheist and you know what that resistance is towards God or are just thinking that there’s no evidence for God.  If there was a curious skeptic listening today, what would you advise them to think or to do or r to consider in terms of God or Christianity? WP:  One thing that is significant for me in that area would be to look at creation and the complexity of creation and to think, ‘How did this just happen by chance? How did the human brain become the most complicated piece of the whole universe by chance? and How did the Bombardier beetle get to be able to shoot fire at his enemies from turds that he can rotate around on either side of his body and not kill himself with the poison he’s squirting at them in his body?’ Things like that are things that the atheist has a real hard time if he’s being honest. JH:  The irreducible complexity and specificity and diversity of creation, the fine tuning of creation from the cell to the cosmos – there’s a lot there isn’t there in terms of trying to figure out how that might happen just by chance. WP:  Yeah by random mutations over billions of years.  And, if you’ve got an open mind to it, it just doesn’t work and so you’re down to ‘Okay, there has to be another explanation.’  Well, that’s where God comes in.  And, I find very few Christians are armed with this kind of capability to discuss.  So that might be a word actually for Christians –  to become informed –  that it’s not a God of the gaps kind of explanation.  You don’t just plug in God where you don’t know what the answer is, that the hypothesis of God for which atheists say there is no reason. To have that hypothesis is actually that we know that certain things are the way that they are because of what we do know about the universe, that God is a good or best explanation because of what we already know about experience of what we already know about intellect in the mind and language and all of those things.  So there’s a lot there for us as Christians to really take hold of in terms of again speaking to Christians. JH:  I guess that’s one of the things that you would probably advise them as to become better educated in terms of the arguments for the existence of God. WP:  Yes arguments for the existence of God, for the evolution-creation debate.  And the other thing is humility, that when– as an atheist speaking from the past – when an atheist runs across someone who takes an really sincere interest in them and doesn’t preach at them and tell them things but has good information, more by asking questions, that that’s to me a more effective way of opening someone’s eyes or helping to open their eyes. JH:  I guess you had that beautiful example of that loving Christian family back even as a child that you could see that they had a sincere interest in you even though you didn’t have the same beliefs.  I’m sure that probably stayed with you.  Obviously if you’re still talking with that friend there’s something there that started and lasted a lifetime really and helped you moved towards God even though it was in a perhaps not a blatant or overbearing way, but just out of love and humility like you say, in sincere interest.  And that’s really beautiful the way that that has come full circle for you. Thank you so much, Warren, for being on the podcast today. I think your story is really a beautiful one.  You really come a long distance from where you were as a child and even as a young adult resisting God to a place where it sounds like you’ve got a beautiful legacy now and family, children, and grandchildren who all embrace God.  You have wonderful life and beautiful story to really celebrate so thank you for coming on the podcast today. WP:  Thanks for having me.  I enjoyed being here.

Apatheism is a word to describe someone who doesn’t believe in God and thinks religion is irrelevant to life. In today’s episode Mary Jo Sharp tells her story of moving from apatheism to a strong belief in God that informs all of her life. Learn more about Mary Jo Sharp at www.maryjosharp.com. There’s a wealth of information to explore – debates, a blog, books and much more! Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute, where we will be listening to the other side of the story. In my research, I heard the stories of over fifty former atheists to better understand their journey from nonbelief to belief in God. The Side B Podcast is a show where I’ll be talking with former atheists who, against all odds, changed their minds about God and became Christians. Each time, we’ll listen to someone’s story and have a conversation about why they were atheists and what opened them to the possibility of God. We’ll talk about why they became Christians and their thoughts and experiences along the way. In this cultural moment, where the other side, side B, is often dismissed without a hearing, this is the podcast where you are encouraged to listen to the other side, whether it is the unheard side of nonbelief or belief, and then draw your own conclusions. You might just be surprised by what you hear. I know I was. Today, we’ll be talking with someone who inherited her atheism from her surrounding culture. It was the air she breathed. God was essentially a nonissue, not worth considering, off the radar. Religion just simply wasn’t relevant to her life. Her name is Mary Jo Sharp. She is a former atheist who came to Christian faith. She now serves as an assistant professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University and is the founder of Confident Christianity apologetics ministry. She is the author of several books, including Why I Still Believe: A Former Atheist’s Reckoning with the Bad Reputation Christians Give a Good God, released this past November. She’s also the author of several Bible studies, including a best seller, Why Do You Believe That? A Faith Conversation, from Lifeway. She lives with her husband and family in Portland, Oregon. you can find out more about Mary Jo at maryjosharp.com. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mary Jo. It’s so great to have you. Thank you so much for having me on. Wonderful! It’s great to have you here and to hear you and your story, as a former atheist come to be a Christian, and we’re all very interested to hear how that happened. So let’s start with side A, your life as an atheist. Why don’t you tell me about your influences growing up? Your family, your culture. What generally formed your identity as an atheist? Yeah. This is always an interesting question for me because I grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and as you noted, in the Portland area, which… I’m back there again. But this area was sort of a post-Christian culture that I grew up in. It wasn’t a place where I would say was heavily influenced in cultural Christianity. And I’m saying this, as opposed to where I lived for twenty years in the South. It was very different from the southern United States, which was more steeped in a culture of Christianity. So the area that I grew up in, and I’ll give an example of what I mean by this cultural Christianity type thing is that, in the area I grew up in, there weren’t a lot of people who I would encounter who would say, like, “Oh yeah. I’ve gone to church my whole life.” They wouldn’t just openly say, “I’m a Christian,” or, “Oh, yeah. My Daddy was a preacher,” or, “My uncle was a preacher,” which is something that I encountered almost all the time, like noticeably different, in the southern United States. Right. So just a very different atmosphere, post Christian, more similar to a European style, a European culture of postmodernity and relativism and things like that. Did you have any exposure to Christianity growing up at all? Or was it anywhere on the radar? Well, sure. Because I live in a Judeo-Christian-influenced society, so there’s Christmas and Easter and things like that and television shows that show Christian pastors, so those things were present in my line of sight. Those movies and things. But what I was exposed to more so was a lot of nature and science shows, because my dad was a huge Carl Sagan fan. He was a chemical engineer. He just loved the sciences. He loved outer space, and that was something… We watched a lot of shows about space. So what was going on was he had exposed me to a bunch of this materialized worldview that was through these television shows. It was a thread. It was the under-girding philosophy of these shows, and so that was something I was exposed to as a very young person, and I didn’t know that this materialist, or this view that all that exists is what is in the material realm… I didn’t know that that was only one view or one philosophy on the nature of reality. That’s just what I was exposed to. So I would say my upbringing, culturally, not being exposed to Christianity other than what I saw on TV and the movies and a few friends here and there, combined with my upbringing outside of the church. My parents did not go to church. By the time I was very young, they had left it. And my dad’s constant viewing of these nature and science shows that were steeped in the materialist view of the world really was the background that formed my views of reality. I really didn’t have a view of God. And I wouldn’t have thought to gain one or why a person should gain one. That just wasn’t on the radar. Right. Did your father call himself an atheist at all? Or just more of a science-oriented person? My dad was one of those people that wouldn’t talk religion. So we did not talk about it and I wouldn’t have known whether he would call himself agnostic, atheist, or what. Because that was not something my family discussed. Okay, okay. Did you have any hostility towards Christianity? Or was it just that they can live their own lives? I’m not really sure who they are. In fact, I’m not really sure what they believe. What did you think about Christians and Christianity around that time? Christianity, to me, was… There was sort of a dual perspective going on in my mind. My experiences with Christians, they seemed pretty nice and innocuous. I had friends who went to church, and I thought they were great people, but then I would see things on television like the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal and how they were using money that people were giving them inappropriately and for their own selfishness, their own selfish desires and greed. And that seemed pretty disingenuous that the church would ask for money. I didn’t know why the church was asking for money because I knew nothing about church. I also realized… Not too long ago, I started thinking about my childhood, and I was like, “You know, the Rajneeshpuram were in here Oregon when I was a child in the early ’80s, and this was this cultish group of people who… They were religious. That was the basis for them having this compound in Oregon. And what I remember of them, the number one thing I remember about this religious group was that they attempted a bio-terrorist attack on the nearby cities, which is they poisoned people with salmonella, and so I think that… I’ve come to understand that was also informing my view, but I just realized. I had a lot of misgivings about what religion was, who God was or is. I didn’t understand things like what religion was for. It just seemed like those kind of things that people did because they were raised that way, and I wasn’t. I would also say that I thought my view, the sort of atheist or non-theist view, was the normative. I actually believed that I was the normative view and had no perspective on the vastness of religious adherence across the world. So I would kind of also say that what I was exposed to as far as religions growing up was the myths, like the ancient Greeks, the Egyptians, as well as Native American stories, and so I probably, if I had known to say it as a child and as a later teenager, I probably would have said I had some chronological snobbery, that I thought I was more progressed than other people. But I wouldn’t have known to say it that way. I just kind of would’ve thought, “Oh, wow! Look how much better we are than all of these religious factions and these myths and things.” Right. There seems to be a bit of a sense of rational superiority sometimes among those who embrace a scientism or a naturalistic worldview. Would you say that that was the case in your world? I would say yes, but it was below the surface, because I had a Midwestern mother and father who taught me to respect people of all different backgrounds and to be polite and nice. So I would never have tried to make other people feel bad about having a religious view. That was not in my DNA. That was not in my blood. So I wasn’t aggressive or hostile person towards religious belief. That’s good. It’s just that it wasn’t something that was on the table for you as an option. Right. And a little bit of distrust towards it, too, about the whole, “Why are you giving money?” It looked like it could really take advantage of people. That sort of thing. As an atheist, it seems like you’re moving along well and feeling comfortable in this worldview or this assumed worldview that was part of your family and part of your culture. Did you ever think about what that meant for your life in terms of atheism? Apart from, say, the naturalistic view of the cosmos? How did it affect your life? Yeah. I wouldn’t have looked long term. I didn’t know to do that, and I think part of that is… I had a great education generally, but my education was lacking in critical thought and philosophy and thinking on these bigger issues, like, “Oh, what you believe now is going to have an impact on your life and your decisions later on,” so I wouldn’t have had that transference in my mind of whatever I believe now and how it’s going to affect me in ten years or five years or twenty years. I wouldn’t have seen the long-term effects of an atheist commitment. Right. So would you call yourself a happy atheist, I guess, at that time? Yeah. Yeah. I felt I was a good person. And I wasn’t a person who drank. I wasn’t a person who did any of these vices, in my mind, a person who took drugs or anything like that, so I thought… And I’m a good student, so I’ve got it together. I’m a good person. Right, right. So moving along, then. What happened in your life or in your thinking that caused you to stop and think about another perspective or open your mind towards the possibility of God’s existence? Well, I think a lot of the environment which I grew up in had this dual effect of giving me this sort of materialist view or naturalist view of the world, but at the same time, the amount of exposure that I had to music… One of the things we haven’t talked about yet is I’m a musician, and so was my father… To music and to these science shows which were teaching me the universe, in all of its vastness and mystery, and just there were a lot of things that I was exposed to that I think had a double effect. One was that it was void of discussion about what is this all here for and why does this all make sense? Why does it all fit together? Why does the universe just seemingly work for survival of humans? Rational human beings on the earth. But at the same time, it was causing me to wonder about that. Like it actually caused me to say… Like sitting there, watching the beauty of a sunset or sitting in my band experiencing the emotion of the musical performance, or when my dad would take us camping and seeing the majesty of the mountains, the vastness of the universe, watching those science shows, considering the intricacy of ecosystems and the complexity of life when we’d watch a nature show, that drew me towards sort of developing this wonder about all of this. What was it here for? So am I just a blob of atoms in a vast, indifferent universe? Or is there something that I’m supposed to be taking from all this? Is there meaning to this created musical experience? Is there meaning to the artistic works? Is there a reason that we should continue in the sciences that transcends my own experience of it, my own subjective experience? And as a teenager, I’m not putting it together that way, but I’m starting to question things about, “Well, why is the universe here at all? Why I am here? Is this it? I live and die and there’s no rhyme or reason, so what’s the purpose of all this?” And I didn’t have any answers to that. So I was wondering. And I think that it’s funny how, as I work on this, as I become older and older, and I look back and reflect on my teenage, especially in later teenage years, as I’m starting to gain my skills, my rational skills, I’m starting to wonder more based on the very things that were sort of holding my attention towards a naturalist perspective, but now they’re influencing me to say, “Wait a minute. Is this all there is?” So those are the kinds of things… I’m starting to ask those kinds of questions, and right at that time, as I’m getting older and I’m starting to ask these questions, there’s a Christian that comes into my life who is influential, and he gives me a Bible. Oh, my! Oh, my! Okay. So what was your view of the Bible around that time? What did you think that was? No idea. I had no idea. I wouldn’t have even known what to call it. I know it was the text that the Christians used, but I really didn’t know anything about it. So what was your response when he gave it to you? What were you thinking? And why did he give you a Bible? Yeah. Well, this is really an interesting part. On this side of belief, believing that there is a God and that he was working in my life, this gentleman was a person who had never shared his faith before, and he was a band director, so he taught the music program in our schools, and I was studying… I knew by my sophomore year in high school that I wanted to become just like him. I wanted to be a band director and teach music. So it’s one of the most influential people who could have been sent to me at that time to share their faith, and here he is in a public school district that had taken out most of the Christian symbolism because they wanted separation of church and state, so they didn’t have Christmas anything, they had winter everything, and stuff like that, and here he is in this situation, saying, he felt really burdened for me, and he felt like he needed to do this. He needed to at least give me a Bible and share his faith with me, and so he did, and it’s not a real big moment. It’s just like he said to me aside in my senior year and says, “Here, I have a gift for you,” and he gives me a Bible, and he says, “When you go off to college, you’re going to have hard questions. I hope you’ll turn to this.” And I need to include that I did not receive it well. I didn’t say anything mean, because that’s not my nature, but he said he was worried that I was going to turn him in to the school for having shared this with me. And I feel so bad about that. Like, “What did I say that was so awful?” Oh, no. I mean obviously… We can appreciate this now. It’s quite a risk to try to impose your faith or be seen as imposing your faith on a student, so he was taking a professional risk to give it to you, wasn’t he? Yeah, yeah. And he was a person that I respected. Obviously, like I said, so I really wanted to… It was just like he hit me at just the right time. I was having these questions. There was no outlet for it. There was no philosophy in my background because the public schools were not teaching critical thinking in that way or philosophy or about these big questions of life, and here comes this man I greatly respect and says, “Here’s some answers to hard questions,” right? Right. So I actually went and read it. I read that Bible. And it really… I was caught off guard because it wasn’t what I expected. So what were you expecting when you were reading the Bible? What did you think it was? So I had no experience, like I just said. Like nothing. I don’t know. But my experience was mythologies, so of the Sumerians and the Greeks and the Egyptians and Native Americans. And as I’m digging into the Bible, it’s nothing like that. As you can tell, I don’t have any experience with, like Judaism or Islam or anything. I don’t have any experience with these monotheistic traditions. So it really took me off guard, in that it sounded very report like in places. Some places it’s very poetic, but other places, like in Luke, he’s just saying, “Hey, I investigated all these things, so you can know the certainty of the things you’ve been taught.” Right. And then he, a little bit later on, lists off all these places and times. He’s got these governing officials and where they were governor and what time it is in the history of the world, and I’m like, “This sounds like he was just trying to report what was going on.” And that really shook me as far as, “Well, maybe he’s intending to tell me something true here. Or maybe he’s intending to report something that actually happened, rather than just tell me a great myth that teaches me some kind of moral lesson.” So it was more of a historical document, and it was a surprise to you. How did it shape your understanding of who God was or Jesus or Christianity when you started reading it? Yeah, that was really important because, since it wasn’t what I was seeing in TV, in the movies, it wasn’t this superficial, just moral guidelines for your life. It actually talked about how humans had failed to do what was good for them the way that God had intended for them to live, and they had failed to be in that way that God had for them, and so, because they had failed to do what God intended for them, they had brought evil upon themselves, and that started to make sense to me about why there’s good and evil in the world. Because I was always a person who felt like morals mattered and there was right and wrong and that there was just and unjust, and so the story from the Bible about how evil got into the world and that evil was not what we were intended for really made a difference to me. It really started to inform me as to, you know what? That makes sense of the human experience. That makes sense of why I have this sense of right and wrong. And so things like that started to inform me. “Oh, I see. If humans were the problem. If they were the ones that brought the evil into the world, and they’re the ones that are constantly engaging in this, then they’re also not the solution, so it makes sense as to why God himself incarnates, comes into the world, and is the sacrifice for our wrongdoing.” That started to make sense to me, logical sense. And so that’s what changes my perspective on the whole story, on who God is, on why Jesus is necessary. That’s what leads me towards understanding God and towards trusting in Him. So it made sense logically. It made sense experientially. Did you ever question whether it was really true? Or how would you know that? Did you investigate that? Or was it just that it rang true to you? So originally, if we’re still in the beginnings of where I come out of atheism into Christianity, it begins to ring true to me. And then I have to figure out what I’m going to do with it. And so as I leave the nest of my parents’ home, where I’d been taught naturalism, and I go off and start my whole college experience… You’re supposed to go away to college and lose your faith, right? I went off to college and started investigating, “What are people talking about when they say faith?” So I went to church on my own for the first time and eventually I find a church where I hear this gospel presentation, and it makes sense to me, and that’s at the point at which I’m ready to trust Jesus. So it’s a little bit of a journey to get to that point, where I say, “Hey, yes, I’m willing to trust this. It wasn’t an apologetic investigation. I wasn’t going, “Well, is this true? Is this not?” It was more experiential, and it had, like you were saying, the ring of truth to it. It’s not until I become a Christian that I start to say, “Wait a second. How do I know this is true?” Before we get there, you had said something, just there, about you heard a gospel presentation. For those who don’t know what that is, in a nutshell, could you tell them what that was and why you were drawn to that? Yes. So it was at the church where I eventually accepted Jesus, and the pastor… Basically they’ll give a sermon. So they’ll explain something from a passage of scripture. And at this particular church, he always ended each of his sermons with what’s called an invitation to accept Christ. So, in doing that, he tells you basically what’s happened. Like I said, God made us for good, but we’ve chosen to do evil, and that’s what’s called being fallen and sinful, and so he explains this, and then he gets to, well what’s the remedy for sin? If we’re intended to be good and part of that was being in relationship with God, how do we get back there? So he tells you what has been done. Jesus has come to pay the penalty for the sin. So by trusting in Him, you can be restored to this right relationship with God, which is the gospel message. It can be done in many different ways. You can talk about it that there was good creation, then there was the fall of mankind, and now there’s redemption through Jesus Christ. And that’s real short. We’re really being sort of reductivist in it because it’s much bigger than that and there’s so many more details, but that’s what I mean by a gospel message, so it helps people understand their circumstance. It helps them understand why there’s evil in the world. It helps them understand that there’s an answer to that. And that has been given through Jesus Christ. And so what rang true again came to ring true for your life. Tell me what happened after that in terms of… How did you connect the intellectual part of your faith with your experiential part of your faith? Well, the intellectual and experiential… What happened is that the experiential is a bit problematic for me, in that it fades over time, so if I have an experience, even if it’s psychologically impacting, like something like coming to trust Jesus, over time, those experiences fade, right? That memory is fading, and the emotion that I felt and all of that, so after becoming a Christian, I wasn’t in a church where there was a rigorous intellectual life. And I hate to denigrate any of the churches that I was ever in, but I wasn’t seriously studying the doctrines of Christianity, like, “So why do we believe Christ rose from the dead?” or, “Why do we say God exists at all?” or, “What does it mean that Jesus atoned for sins?” I wasn’t really thrown into a deep education where I’m studying the intellectual aspect of my beliefs. So you’ve got this experience, but then I run into these other experiences of Christians behaving opposite of what I’m reading in the Bible. So not only is my former experience starting to fade over the years, but I’m gaining new experience, and they’re hurtful, with Christians who are being hypocritical about their faith. And so they’ll say one thing but then they’ll absolutely do another and not hold themselves accountable, and this is becoming a pattern that I’m seeing. So what happens over time is that those experiences start to cause in me some emotional doubt. I start to distrust Christians, and that begins to cause me to distrust this whole endeavor of Christianity, which transfers over to distrusting God as a person. Is He even there? Is He even real? Does He exist? And I realize I have no answers to that. And there’s where the intellectual side comes in. And I say, “Wow! What did I do back then?” Here, I’ve plunged myself into this community, and I’m just going to be in short form. I don’t mean everybody was this way, but in short form, this community of hypocrites who I like less than my former atheist friends, and I feel less accepted for who I am, who are constantly trying to put me in this mold of a southern evangelical woman that I don’t fit because I’m not from the South and I don’t come out of evangelicalism, and so this experience with this cultural Christianity just really causes me to have these emotional doubt, and it eventually leads to intellectual questioning. And that’s the first time I start going, “I really need to know why I say I believe this because I’m starting to feel like I really don’t want this to be true. Or don’t even care if it’s true. I just want to get away from this.” And so I start into this path of trying to discover, “Why do I believe Jesus rose from the dead? Why do I say God exists?” and that sends me into the intellectual journey that I’ve been on and am still on. That’s amazing. I appreciate your honesty there. A lot of people wouldn’t say that, and it’s really quite an interesting conversion story, that you convert to a belief that rings true but its people don’t bear out what the Good Book says, right? Although it does say that we’re fallen, so… But fallen to a point that it’s very disheartening and discouraging and fuels your doubt. So what path or what direction did you go in terms of trying to provide some answer to some of these doubts that you had? Yeah. When I started out, I didn’t know what I was looking for because I had no experience in this and it wasn’t being taught in church. I found, in church, they already assumed the truth of Christianity, so they never taught, like, “How do we know it’s true?” So I thought, “I’ve got to find somebody who’s talking about, ‘Does God exist?'” And I don’t know how I got there. I know that I began asking those questions, and that’s what I remember, so I started looking for answers to how do I know that Jesus actually rose from the dead and how do I know God exists, and I remember finding a book in one of our church libraries that was by Lee Strobel. It was The Case for Christ, and I actually found a book before that. And I don’t always include that in all of my testimonies because sometimes it’s just too much to include, but it was Norm Geisler’s book, Christian Apologetics, and- Oh, my. Yes, that’s… I had some really hard philosophical terms in there for a person who’d never been trained in philosophy or theology, and I went, “Okay, this is really lovely, but I’m a band director, and I work 70-hour weeks, so I’m going to set that one aside.” Yes. For now. For now. “And I’m going to go after this one because I can read it, and I can consume it right away.” And I never heard anybody delve into how do we know that Jesus rose from the dead? Or what’s the evidence for this? And Strobel’s book fascinated me because of how he treated it journalistically and from a law perspective, so that set me on the path towards, “Okay, who did he interview? Now I’ve got to go read those guys, and now… Oh, wait! There’s debates. They’re debating people who disagree with them? Why has this never been brought to my life?” And so now I want to hear the atheist rebuttals of all these things because now I’m familiar with these terms, theist and atheist, and I want to see what has been brought against the Christian faith, and so now I’m engaging in these debates, listening to them, analyzing things, and I start to see that Christianity, the answers coming out of the Christian philosophical debates are more coherent. They make more sense. Logically taken to their conclusion, they seem to work with the human experience, and that the atheist arguments weren’t doing that. They weren’t as explanatory about what we have. Why is the universe? What is the universe? Those kinds of things. About human value, meaning, and purpose. And so I began to have this shift towards, “Yeah, the church has caused me a lot of hurt and pain, but it looks like Christianity’s true and I’m not going to be able to escape that rationally.” Right. And it was actually providing answers to all those questions you had as a late teen, when you started really looking at your life and meaning and purpose and value, and those questions were finally being answered, I guess in a satisfying way? Yes. Yes, that’s a good way of saying it. Yeah, so it was almost like it was coming full circle, and you were having both answers to human experience, as well as the logical questions you were having. So everything was coming together, like you say, in a more comprehensive, coherent way. Yeah. And it was actually kind of funny, because honestly I had gotten to a point where I was like, “Man, if I could just go back to a non-theist or agnostic point of view, I could just be done with all this Christian community and hypocrisy and this group I don’t really relate to! I could just walk away. That would be nice.” And I can see why some atheists who leave the faith, or people who have been Christian and then leave it, I can see why they say it’s liberating. Because you are released from the burden of this community that you’re trying to be a part of. And it can be so emotionally draining to be a part of a community like that. Any community. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the Christian community or the atheist doughnut eaters’ community, it’s draining to be a part of a community, so I can see why that initial, “I’m walking away,” can be so liberating. Because you finally have been released from what I was describing before, having to engage with people who are fallen and are working through on their own journey towards Christlikeness. Yes, we’re all broken people, aren’t we? Yeah. But I hope you’ve found at least a community of people that you are finding a little bit better success and more authenticity, I guess you could say. So, leading on from there, you actually took this intellectual journey pretty seriously, because you actually ended up pursuing formal education in it, didn’t you? Yes, yes. Do you want me to describe that? Yes. Why don’t you tell me about that? Yeah, so during my time of reading and listening to debates, I actually subscribed to a journal, and it was a Christian journal, and that journal was an advertisement for a university, and it was Biola University, which I’d never heard of, but when I looked at who I would be studying with to get a master’s in apologetics, I was like, “I’m reading these people already. This is who I’m reading,” and so I thought it sort of makes sense for me to do that. I don’t make decisions on an impulse almost ever. I over analyze everything. I mean everything. So yeah, I saw this advertisement, and it was right at the time when I was trying to decide to go back to get a master’s in music education, so I could be a college music professor, and here comes this master’s of arts in apologetics, and I’m like, “This doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t know what I’m going to get out of this, other than it’s just an intellectual journey. I’m not going to get any monetary compensation. In fact, I’m just going to pour into this because I’m a music teacher,” but I just knew it was right, and I went after it, and that was first time I really found a community of Christian intellectuals who were all there just to be on an intellectual journey. Now, I don’t want to make it sound like it’s so heady. I don’t believe in the separation of the emotions from the intellect. I believe it’s all bound together. So part of growing in our relationship with God is knowing who he is, right? And properly worshiping him with our emotions and our mind. You know, the Matthew passage that we’re supposed to worship the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. And here I found this group of believers that are doing just that. And I was like, “Wow! They exist! These people really want to know God, and it’s not for any kind of perceived gain as far as a job or a monetary outcome. They’re just really investigating what they believe,” and that was just so life giving to me at that point in my life, just to see these people who just worshiped God with all they had, including the life of the mind. And so I got that formal education. I got the master’s degree, and during that time, there was an assignment to start a blog or you could have a private email conversation with somebody defending the resurrection, and I ended up starting the blog. I didn’t want to. I did the private conversation first for the grade. And then I thought, “Why won’t I be a public Christian? Why won’t I put this out in public?” And a lot of that has to do with my upbringing in the Northwest, where religion is more private, but it was that finally going, “Okay, I’m going to put my faith out in public that eventually leads to a lot of speaking, a lot of writing, and then eventually a professor position at Houston Baptist University. I guess you could say that you’ve been sufficiently convinced, that your doubts have been answered? Yeah. And people ask me that. They’re like, “You never have any doubt?” and I’m like, “Well, I don’t have the mind of God, so there’s always going to be room for mystery. There’s always going to be that room for, ‘I don’t know X,’ and so that’s where I’m at.” I don’t think I can get away from my belief in God. I don’t think I can get away from me seeing it as true and as justified, even warranted, but I do think that there’s still room for me to not know things and to develop and grow, and I think that will always be there because I’m human. Well, that’s an incredible and very humble attitude to take, I think. Your story is a really wonderful one, and I think it’s a very honest one, and I love it because it looks at the whole of who you are, your experience, your culture, your family, your questions, your existential questions, and somehow God met you in every way, intellectually, experientially, existentially. He is there providing substantive ways to meet all of those needs and answers for you. So, at the end of the day, you are a confident Christian. That’s what your website says. You promote confident Christianity. What would you say, as we’re ending our conversation, to someone who is a nonbeliever, someone who perhaps is apathetic or never really even thought about God or the question of God? Do you have any words for them? Yeah, that’s great. Because I’ve been on that side, so I would say to be more critical of your own views and be skeptical of how you arrived to your own commitments. That’s normally what we think of… Atheists are skeptical. However, religious people arrived at their commitments, but I would say be skeptical of how you’ve arrived at your own. So, for an example, like in being critical or skeptical about your beliefs, carry your beliefs out to their logical conclusion or their logical end. And there’s a book by Andy Bannister where he does this. He takes some of the New Atheist movement, their arguments, and I want to specifically say the New Atheist movement, not like the atheist philosophers of old. This is this new movement. It’s a popular movement that has arisen. He takes some of their arguments, and he takes them out to their logical end through fictitious scenarios that he creates. And it’s riotous what happens… It’s hilarious. I mean it’s just hilarious what happens. His book’s actually called The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: Or: the Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments. And it’s having a bit of fun with failing to take an argument to its logical end. So, you know, when I was looking at human value, meaning, and purpose, well, Richard Dawkins, the atheist biologist at Oxford, he’s aptly described an atheist doctrine taking this view that there is no meaning, purpose, or value to the universe, that DNA is all their is, and we dance to its music. You’ve got to take that all the way out. So he says there’s no rhyme or reason to anything, right? There’s nothing informing you. Right, right. You know, he has the book The God Delusion, but if you think about it, it could be like The Human Value and Purpose Delusion or The Human Rights Delusion. Those things don’t exist in this universe of just everything’s ever evolving in this pattern, that you’re reducible down to your DNA. And so that’s one of the things I would like to see, is that you take your beliefs and you implement them, rather them in a buffet style of, “I pick and choose what I believe when it helps me or with whatever I like.” Because I think we can get kind of smug about our position once we finally commit to proclaiming a viewpoint and that actually can hurt our inquiry into learning about the world in which we live. So I want to make sure that we don’t become these kind of people who cut ourselves off from learning. That’s what I would say. Be skeptical about your own skepticism. Cynicism is not a virtue. It can keep you from learning rather than growing. And then maybe, as a final tag, maybe try to figure out why someone might actually believe that God’s existence is convincing. Why do they believe in God? Why do they find that convincing? And while you’re doing that, leave out your stereotyped answers and really consider that question. So that’s my to nonbelievers advice. Well, that’s great advice. It’s great advice for anyone. The unexamined life is not worth living, right? According to Socrates, and really examining your own presuppositions or what you think about your own views is a good thing to do. It’s a healthy, it’s a human thing to do. It’s a way to grow, so thank you for that. And the last question is what would you say to Christians to help them understand those who don’t see a need for God in their lives? Or who don’t believe? Yeah. Along the same lines, I would say one thing is to be critical of your beliefs as well and about how you arrived at those beliefs. Because, in my own experience, I’ve seen a lot of Christians who rely on authority, specifically of their pastor. And that’s not inherently wrong, but if you’ll dig through your scriptures, you’ll see that the Apostle Paul actually told us to test everything and hold onto the good. And he was addressing the internal teachings of the church in Thessalonica. So that’s an impetus we have from the Apostle Paul, and he actually praises the Bereans in Acts 17 because they did check the things out that Paul was teaching. So our Apostle Paul, this guy who writes more of the New Testament than any other author, is telling us we should check things out. He even praised people for checking out his own teaching. So I think we need to be more careful about being critical thinkers and really we shouldn’t take every question about what we believe as an affront to our faith or as a personal attack. And I think that’s been a problem in the church, so that’s one thing. I would say the other thing is we have to remember that, in our church history, there have been people who have used the church, its teachings, and their authority as a weapon for wealth, power, and control, and that has damaged our testimony about the love and grace of God and about the self sacrifice of God through the incarnation, death, and resurrection, so even though… Let’s say you and I, as Christian believers, we might know about the amazing sacrifices and love the church has shown across the world in humanizing various people groups through our offer of medical aid, education, food, water, shelter, fighting for basic human and civil rights, people tend to remember the bad things about us and the bad things that have happened more so than the good, so as Christians, we can’t forget this idea that people are remembering our sins. So be up front about it. And you said a great word earlier. We need to show authenticity. That we’re sinful people, we still have all the same problems as other people in the world, and we’re trying to conform our lives to something better. We’re trying to be Christlike. Yes. We are. We are. And the shame of it is that Christian hypocrisy turned you off even as a Christian, almost caused you to doubt and to lose your faith, and we’re all called to a life worthy of walking after Christ. Wow, what an incredible story you have, Mary Jo, and just the wisdom and the advice that you’re able to give just pours out of you because of your thoughtful journeying from atheism to Christianity. I appreciate so much you being on this program, and I hope that everyone listening will take a look at her website, maryjosharp.com.  

Many people think the stories in the bible are mere myth and legend.  As a historian, so did Frank.  In today’s episode he talks about moving from a skeptical view of Christianity to one which changed the whole of history as well as his own life. Episode Transcript JH: Podcast will listen to the story of a former atheist to change their mind and came to believe in God the culture today it’s hard to find places and spaces where you can listen to two sides of a story but for the guests who come on this show they have not only listened to both sides they have thought and lived as atheists and they have thought and lived as Christians so this puts them in a unique position to give us insight as to what motivated them to become atheist but also what changed their mind we can listen and learn from both sides of their story. Today we’ll be listening to Frank Federico who lives in Sydney Australia is a former atheist who came to Christian faith something he thought he would never do.   Welcome to the podcast Frank.  It’s great to have you on the show.   As we’re getting started, tell me a little bit about yourself. FF:  Thanks for having me on.  My name is Frank Federico.  I’m a high school history teacher in Sydney, Australia. JH:  Tell me about the religious or secular culture there in in Australia. FF:  It’s really a highly secular society.  It’s not common for people to openly talk about their faith if they have one.  There are a lot of people in Australia that do have a faith.   In the census that we had a couple of years ago, over half the population said that they were Christian of some sort and then there are other faiths as well.  We’re quite a multicultural nation.  But generally speaking, we’re not at a culture that is open in terms of religious belief.  People are tolerant and people are welcome to have different faiths but it’s not one where we overtly talk with one another about what we believe JH:  So backing up then as you were a child, what was your sensibility about religion and Christianity or God or any of that?   Were you raised in a family that had any  religious beliefs at all? FF:  I was raised a Catholic.  I went to Catholic schools all my schooling.  I also regularly went to church until the age of 14 or 15 when I didn’t want to go anymore.  So I had an understanding or limited understanding of Catholicism and certainly had experience in that.  Both my parents were strong believers and regular churchgoers. JH:  I know you went to church.  Did you have a belief in God?   Did you believe that God was real or true or was it  something that you went through the motions? FF:  I definitely believed it as a little kid.  I remember going to church sometimes on my own and praying.  I had some rosary beads that I would pray through.  I remember having my confirmation and believing that.   I was ten when I had my confirmation.  But it was around the age of 14 or 15 where I started to drift away from that and refused to go to church with my parents.  I was a bit too old for them to force me to go and if I did go and  the back of the church and listen to the radio through an earpiece rather than pay attention what was happening.  That may have embarrassed them a bit.  In the end ,they  gave in and  let me stay home while they went.  So, it was around that age 14, 15 when I really started to rebel against it and dislike it. 4:36. JH:  That rebellion – did it come from a place of doubt like you didn’t believe what they were saying or you  didn’t like it?  What was it that made you push back against what your parents were trying to show you or teach you? 4:55 FF:  It was a long time ago.  When  back upon it, it was a combination of frustration at school because we had religious education at school.  I was reaching an age where I was starting to question what I was hearing.  So, my experience of Christianity as a child and a young young teen was that I learned what we were meant to believe and I learned what we had to do but I was never taught why these things were true.  And, I remember particularly when I was in year 10 around the age of 14-15 where I had a particular religious education teacher that year.  He was very passionate and I found his passion interesting but also a bit grating.  And, I wanted to ask him questions about why he held the beliefs that he had.  I didn’t find the answers that I got from him particularly satisfactory and that became my experience also when I started asking my parents. 6:12 My parents didn’t have much of an education and they had a simple faith.  They couldn’t answer the kinds of questions I was asking.  But also  it was coinciding with a time in my life where I was becoming more and more influenced by my peers and most of them had no interest in religion.  We were interested in aspects of culture, music, TV, film that was very far removed from the kinds of things that Christianity wanted from us.   it was a combination of those things. 6:52 that lack of any  rationale for why I was doing these things as a Christian and also at the same time that culture that I was part of – that teen culture that I was part of that  had no space or time for God.  And that’s what began a fairly rapid moving away from any  belief.  So, by the time I finished high school which was the age of 17 I really had no belief at all.  And, I was quite hostile to it.  People wanted to raise it with me, I was very negative and I would argue back. 7:40 7:40 JH:  You didn’t  take God off the table.  You were really hostile towards those who did believe.   What do you think fueled this hostility? FF:   that I felt people who believed was stupid because I had never heard any  rational reason for believing.  To me it  seemed like some  superstition that people are born with and they don’t let go of.  When I was studying science – this is probably another factor actually in what shifted me – when I was studying science again around that 9-10 period of my education, I kept on seemingly hearing things that contradicted with the faith.  The perception that I had, that many had or still have, is that there is an incompatibility between what science has taught us about the world and religious belief.  So, I felt that Christianity and religion in general was belief without evidence.  It’s faith and faith has no evidence.  You believe in spite of evidence.  You believe despite the fact that there is evidence that contradicts what you believe.  And that for me was annoying . That made me angry because I was someone who is interested in reading.  I was always a lover of history for a very long time.  I was quite academic at school and this  religion and religious beliefs seemed very non-academic.  So, if people wanted to raise it with me I would ask hostile questions or I would make hostile statements because I  felt they had nothing to offer me at all of any value or any credibility. 9:37 At the same time there is that aspect of my life where I  don’t want to know. I’m now drawn into teen culture.  I finished school and I’m at University and I start living the typical  hedonistic type of lifestyle – pubs and clubs and all that  scene. So, there’s not much place for God in all of that I  didn’t want to know. 10:05 JH:  That raises a question for me.  When you were having these doubts and questions and you did ask your parents and they didn’t seem to have any answers.  Anyone else that you approached,  even if it was in a hostile way, did you ever encounter any Christians yes that seemed to have an answer or have some  a rationale and or not underlying their belief? Or was it  they would shrug and it  confirmed your superstition? 10:47 FF:  I asked my teachers at school in my senior years or particularly the man I mentioned earlier the one I had in year 10.  But at University there were quite a few Christians on campus and I did notice them, I noticed their groups.  And actually I remember a few times where I’d be I could see them from a distance   like they were doing that  evangelism to people as they’re walking by and I could see them.  And I was watching them and as I was getting closer to them and I was saying ‘Please don’t stop me.  Please don’t stop me. Please don’t stop me.’  And, they did.  I didn’t engage.  I  didn’t want to engage because I felt like there was nothing that they could possibly say that I want to hear.  I really had this feeling about Christians that it was almost cultish.  And I  didn’t want to know.   Obviously, eventually I did find someone who I engaged with and had an ability to answer questions but that was unforeseen.  That was a scenario I was forced into,. not one that I was seeking.  It was one that I couldn’t avoid. 12:06 JH:  Why don’t you tell me about that? Is this something that might have opened you up towards the possibility that there was something more?  Did you meet someone?  What happened? 12:12 FF:  This is the turning point.  So, this happened in 1997.  I was responsible for a youth group at school in year seven.  I was the coordinator and I was organizing a camp for these kids and I was trying to find teachers to come on the camp with me. I had a few people in mind and some friends that I wanted to ask and a couple of friends in the science faculty that I wanted to come but their head of Department refused me.  She said look they always go on camps.  You can’t have them.  It was getting to one or two days before the camp and I was getting very desperate.  I really needed another male to come on the camp and I said, “Look, can’t I even have one of them?”  She said “No, but you can have this guy called David” who had  started that year.   we were towards the end of the first term and I had never really met him but I’ve heard about him.  And, what I’ve heard about him was that he was a Christian and that was enough for me to not really want to have much to do with him, right?  Such was my negativity towards Christians so I  tried to avoid them. 13:32  So, I had never had a conversation with him at all but I was that desperate to find someone to come on the camp that I asked him because I had no alternative.  He was willing to come.  I thought perhaps I don’t have to have much to do with him on the camp.  I’ll be too busy anyway so it should be okay.  But the way things worked out was that there were three buses transporting these kids to this campsite and I end up boarding the last bus because I had to  sort out payments and that  thing.  So two buses had left there was only one bus left.  I get on that bus.  There’s only one seat left on the bus and the seat is next to David. This bus trip is going to be about an hour and I’m going to have to talk to this guy for an hour.  This was totally unwanted and unplanned. 14:29 After saying, “How are you finding school ?” because he was a beginning teacher.  It was his first year of teaching and I was in my 4th year of teaching and  getting through that. After 5 minutes, I was stuck for things to talk about and he was quite introverted.  So I  went at it.  I said, “I hear that you’re a Christian.  How does that work?  You’re a science teacher.” Something like that.  And, that was the beginning of the conversation. 15:00  For the first time in my experience, I met someone who was clearly intelligent and who could answer some of the questions I was asking and also who would say that he didn’t know everything.  And also, the things I didn’t like that Christianity he didn’t like about Christianity.  For example, I had issues with the institutional church, particularly at that point in time – the papacy.  I actually had  been to Rome and the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel.  I saw all this  opulence and all this wealth and I found such a disconnect between what I saw there and what I understood the church was meant to be doing.  And as a historian, I knew about the Crusades and the horrible violence down there in the name of God.  So I asked him about this.  “How can you ify this and ify that?”  He was saying that “I don’t ify it.”  He could see problems with those things.  I thought, okay. 16:18 And, I had never encountered a Protestant Christian before.  My idea of Protestantism was some  cult.  I really knew very little about it.  This was my first experience with someone who was Protestant.  I  want to say this point, by the way ,I’m not anti Catholic at all and I’ve got many good Catholic friends and I have a deep respect for them and I know well and truly there are good things in Catholicism so I hope this doesn’t come across as anti Catholicism.  It’s  my experience at that point in time – that’s where I was and that’s what I saw and perceived. 16:51  So meeting someone from a different branch of Christianity and someone who could actually answer some of my questions and recognize some of the problems with Christianity was very different.   that conversation and then other encounters –  we actually shared a room on this campsite as well as it turned out.  I didn’t want that either, but we spent a bit of time talking.  That was a very important point for me because it broke down some barriers.  I would never have spoken to him voluntarily. I would never created that conversation voluntarily. I was forced into it by circumstance.  And, I certainly didn’t become a Christian from that conversation but I was softened by it. 17:39 Then the next week something strange happened.  I was in this reading club, a history books reading club .  Every month you get this brochure of history books that you could buy.  On the cover page there was a book of the month that they wanted to really promote.  And, the book of the month  happened to be a book called Jesus, the Evidence.  There’s no way I would have even contemplated reading or buying that book if it wasn’t for that conversation with David.  I bought it actually thinking that this book will have no evidence that it won’t be much at all and then I’ll read this and I’ll be able to go back to David and be able to point out a few things that he’s got wrong, basically demonstrate that he was incorrect in his beliefs. 18:40 So, I got this book.  It arrived a few weeks later and it was about 300 pages long or something like that but I read it very quickly.  This was really an eye opener for me.  I was stunned by what I read in this book.  I did not expect to find the things that I found in there.   that really was the real catalyst for me to progress to pursue this further.   I can tell you a few things that I got out of that book. JH: Sure! What did you find in the book that was so surprising? 19:21 FF:   One of the things I thought about the New Testament was that the stories of Jesus were written hundreds of years later.  I had this idea that it was like a mythology that had developed.  I believed that there was probably some person called Jesus but the stories were like tales that developed over time and got warped and they lacked all  historical credibility.  Well, what this book to my surprise taught me was that that actually wasn’t the case, that the New Testament sources on the life of Jesus were written within the lifetime of people who actually knew him and were based on the testimony of eyewitnesses or possibly even written by eyewitnesses.  That really surprised me.  I did not know that.  And, the fact that there was so many of them also surprised me.  Why were there so many texts about this guy?  Knowing a bit about ancient history, there aren’t that many texts from the ancient world and if there are there they tend to be about the rich and powerful, the great emperors and the like.  But, to have so many written about this particular individual perplexed me. 20:45 But of course as an historian, the fact you’ve got multiple sources testifying about him and they’re early obviously made me think because, well, why is this here?  Why had they written this?  And, they are in agreement with each other to a large extent.  So, I had to think about that.  And then, the book had information that archaeological finds.  And, that confirmed a lot of the place names and the people that are mentioned in the New Testament.  Again, that surprised me because if it was written centuries later I wouldn’t have expected that.  But, archaeology has confirmed a lot of what we find in the New Testament. 21:30 And then the resurrection event itself and the fact that there were so many accounts about that.   I remember reading about Paul and what Paul said about the resurrection.  He said that if the resurrection had not happened then Christian is a waste of time, the faith is futile.  He basically staked everything on this event being true.  And, you read it.  You read this text and you can see they really believe what they’re saying.  Not only do they really believe it, they were actually willing to die for it.  I found that hard to understand because it wasn’t  that they died for a belief because people will do that.  People have always done that.  But, they’re actually dying for something they claim to have seen with their own eyes – that Jesus actually died on the cross, that he was buried, that he rose again, and that they had numerous experiences with him.  Then when given the opportunity to shut up about it because they were going to get persecuted, they chose persecution.  They chose suffering.  They chose death.  And, that needed explaining.  How do you account for these people testifying to this dead man this and making this particular claim? 22:45 So, I found all this quite troubling because I didn’t actually know how to answer it.  My instinct was not to believe it, but it was hard.  It was hard not to believe it.   And, I had lots of questions still, a lot of questions about it.  I wasn’t A Christian because of that, but it made a big difference reading this  material.    for the first time I understood that for Christians or at least for thinking Christians, their faith is not blind.  That’s what I understood faith to be,  blind belief without evidence, right?  But they’ve got this evidence and then their faith follows from that.  That was a shock to me and I had a huge number of questions that I wanted to pursue. 23:39 So I went back to David at school and asked him if he was willing to meet with me and answer some of those questions.  Then, we did that at school but we found the time wasn’t enough. So what ended up happening we went to a local Bowling Club after work one afternoon and that’s how it started.  I  bombarded him with questions and this happened for weeks – week after week after week for several months.  In the midst of that, I found a Bible that my dad had and I  started reading from Act of the Apostles because I thought I knew it was in the gospels.  I didn’t, but I thought I knew!  But, I started reading from Acts and I  got a red pen. I started scribbling questions or underlying things that made no sense or seem stupid.  That’s what happened.  That’s how it began. 25:14 JH:  So as an historian, you wanted to know what grounded historical reality.  It’s interesting to me that you went from a place of really not wanting to know to really wanting to know.  It took you on a pursuit of an investigation of your own to discover what was true.   Was David able to answer some of those questions that you were red marking and outlining and circling and writing down? 25:48 FF:  He could answer some.  He couldn’t answer all and that was okay because I’d rather that than pretending to know an answer when you don’t.  When he couldn’t find or didn’t know the answer, he would find out for me as best he could.  But, he’s an intelligent guy and he was able to answer a lot of questions that I had.  Obviously, it really helped me.  But also the thing about David was he was the first knowledgeable, well-thought Christian that I’d met or at least I’ve had an opportunity to talk to at length with.  And, as I got to know him also  I could see in him something different that I had not really seen in in other people.  There was something about his character that was a bit different to what I knew.  He is quite a humble person and he’s obviously very patient to put up with my questions.  And a lot of my questions were coming from a point of hostility was he was able to listen to that and handle that graciously. 27:06 I was very fortunate, blessed to have had this interaction with someone of his persona because if I’d met with someone who was perhaps more dogmatic or a bit aggressive or not so well thought through,  quoting Bible at me for example, I don’t think that would have worked.  that would have had a negative impact.  So, the fact that he was a science teacher as well made a big difference to me because I didn’t understand how they could be reconciled but he clearly was able to reconcile them.  Later on I met his fiance and wife who’s also a science teacher.  A couple years later another Christian science teacher joined the science faculty at school so it became very obvious to me that there is no incompatibility between a scientist or science and Christianity.  28:09 It was a combination of factors in my case of meeting the right  person that suited the person that I was but also I’m finding out for the first time the historical foundation for Christianity and that’s been important to me ever since. 28:35 JH:  Obviously you are an historian and seeking after foundational truths about whether or not something actually really happened.  But as you said, the resurrection – if that’s an historical event – if that didn’t actually happen, then the Christian faith is in vain.   So, I can see why the pursuit of these issues is not only important but actually essential in terms of belief or nonbelief in Christianity.  You said that you started reading the Bible.  What was your view of the Bible before you started reading it? 29:19 FF:  I didn’t trust it.  As I mentioned earlier, I felt that it was unreliable in the sense that whatever was written there would have been written long after the events that it purported to describe.  I thought it was a lot of mythology I didn’t know a lot about the Old Testament but I thought it was all mythology.  And with the New Testament I didn’t think it was all the same type, but it was a  mythology or at least a serious distortion of what happened.  I felt that the people back in the ancient world really wouldn’t have known what they were talking about, that they were more gullible, that they were more likely to believe anything.  I didn’t treat it seriously at all.  I found the ethics and morality of Christianity to be inhibiting.  I had this view at the time that whatever I felt to be right was right.  Why should I allow anything to constrain me?  That’s how I lived so I felt like it would be a burden to follow this religion and then stupid to follow this religion given its poor basis.   The text of the Bible itself I had no regard for. 30:49 I actually remember when I was in high school, I literally did tear pages out of the Bible that we had in class when the teacher wasn’t looking and I’d throw it around the room.  I remember being really amused when the teacher would tell someone to ‘pick up that rubbish and put it in the bin.’  That’s how I was.  That summed up what I thought this text was.   Not good.  I was very negative about it. 31:22 JH:  When you started reading the bible for the first time, what were your impressions of it? It seems to me that your story seems to be one of perpetual surprise – an expectation of some sort that when you entered into it seemed to be almost disappointed when you found something so totally different than what you were thinking it would be. 31:45 FF:  Initially I was finding what I was expecting because I started with Acts and Acts starts with the ascension of Jesus.  Supernatural things were happening pretty quickly in in in the book of Acts and I was struggling with that.  And there’s the story of Ananias and Sapphira in chapter 5 which I’m not sure how familiar with that but that’s an old one.  It  seems too far-fetched.  But at the same time as I was reading Acts, it was written in a way that clearly was not of a mythological genre.  It clearly was written as a kind of history.  It was narrating events.  It didn’t feel like the kind of mythology that I was aware of from my own teaching and study that you would get from the Greco Roman world.  It had a different feel about it.  And being an historian I quite enjoyed Acts because it was written in a way I quite enjoyed reading it.  I actually found it quite stimulating.  At the same time I’m looking to pick it apart. 33:24  But, at some point David  directed me to look at the gospels.   that’s really when this spiritual transformation began.  As I came to read more directly about Jesus and what he did and what he said.  This process between the first meeting at the Bowling Club and becoming a Christian was about four months of these meetings.  I felt that gradually I was changing or becoming more accepting of what I was reading and also coming to like what I was reading.   34:07  When I came to understand what the gospel actually was, that is that we are saved by grace, that is not through anything that we do, that salvation and forgiveness is free, that I don’t have to earn God’s favor, that God already favors me – I was astonished by that!  I had no understanding of that as a Christian as a child.  That was not at all part of my understanding.  My understanding as a child was that when you do the wrong thing, you’ve got to go to the priest.  You’ve got to make a confession then you’ve got to say certain prayers as penance and you’re going back and forth always trying to make up for the wrongdoings that you’ve done.  That’s an endless process – one that you can’t win.   But, reading and understanding actually what the bible teaches about forgiveness and God’s love –  that was really beautiful and actually liberating.  I never knew Christianity was like that.   I thought Christianity was  more rules.  But, Christianity is actually liberating.  It liberates you from that pressure.  You don’t have to try and work for God’s favor.  You have it already.  That really moved me. 35:54 When I was able to articulate that to David, I know it moved him because it finally clicked.  That’s what this is about!  And given that I’d reached the point where I thought historically this has got a lot going for it, and given that the message of it is actually really beautiful, it happened!  It happened!  I can’t pinpoint the moment or day, but without me realizing it, I actually become a Christian.  I really believe this.  And it’s so strange because I never went looking for this.  I never wanted it. I never imagined this could ever happen.  And, in many ways this was going to cost me.   I recognized and believed this was true.  So, if it’s true, if I were to walk away from this then I would be deliberately living a lie and that would not be good.  I couldn’t do that.  So, I was convicted and that was the turning point in my life.  And, 20 years later I’m still meeting with David every week.  He is my best friend!  I never mentioned that one! 37:13 JH: Who would have ever thought that guy you avoided could be your closest friend?  That’s pretty amazing!  Tell me how your life has been since that major turning point over the last 20 (no 23) years?  How has your life changed from atheism to Christianity, being a Christian? 37:36 FF:  A lot changed.  Initially it was actually quite difficult because most of my friends obviously were not Christian and I was so different in my interests and even how I was behaving that it was quite uncomfortable for all of us.   The kinds of activities that we used to do I, I  couldn’t do them anymore.  I used to like gambling.  I used to like clubbing.I used to like drinking to excess.  I would take drugs. I was sexually active. All of that didn’t fit with the  person that I now wanted to be as a Christian.  It was very uncomfortable for me to continue to go to those places.  I continued to hang out with my friends and some of these friends I’ve had for over 20 years.  It was very difficult.  One particular friend who I’ve known since  kindergarten absolutely savaged me for this. He took shreds off me on the phone and basically asked me the kinds of things that I would have asked as an angry atheist and I was not in a position back then really about to answer those questions.  So, that was really it was very hard. 39:00 At the same time, I was withdrawing because I wanted to know more about God and I wanted to spend more time with Christian people.   It was such a massive turning point.  It was quite dramatic in a sense.  The friends that I had for so long, we drifted apart so quickly and permanently.  The only friend I had from my school days was the one friend who was a committed Christian and we still are friends which is good.  But, that was hard.  So, in terms of good friends, I had only David for that point in time.  But then I joined the church and I met some really lovely people in that church and got to meet more Christians over time. One thing that has changed is what I view as being important.  My priorities in life shifted.  I was overwhelmed with enthusiasm for wanting to know as much as I could about Christianity.  I’m one of those people who have always got questions and want to always keep asking.   The first minister at the church where I went was getting a little bit overwhelmed with all my questions but he did a really good thing.  He put me onto this theology course for laypeople that was being offered by Moore Theological College in Sydney.  It was like a correspondence course.  It wasn’t like a high academic level course, but it was good for people  wanting to know more who were in the pews at church.  So, I took that on and I absolutely loved it.  It was 21 subjects.  I spent 11 years doing it.  David did it with me as well so I was doing that while we were working.  I loved it.  I couldn’t get enough. I  wanted to know more and more and more. 41:22 FF:  At the same time, I would question things.  I didn’t accept everything that I was told. It’s not as if I stop the skepticism. I had reached the point where I did believe the history and the evidence is strong for this being true, but it didn’t mean that I accepted everything that I was told.  I wanted to learn answers to all the questions that I had and I kept on pursuing them.  Then when I finished those subjects, I wanted to keep going, so then I actually took a year off work and pursued theological study at a higher academic level and I’ve done that a couple of times.  I’ve taken a couple of years off of work to do that. 42:08 For me, knowing what’s true – this stuff didn’t bother me before.  I wanted to live a good comfortable life and have fun and be happy.  For me now what’s most important is knowing what is true and then trying as far as much as I can to live by that.  That’s a real shift in my mentality and in the way I think.  The way I view things like the purpose of life – What am I here for?  Where is it all going?  That completely shifted.  For example, thinking about death a lot more.  I never used to think about that very much but then I started to think about that more as a Christian but in a positive way because the resurrection hope is so amazing – there is more to our existence than what we have in this life and that when we die there’s going to be a new creation.  We’re going to have new bodies and we’re going to have eternity.  Knowing there is that end goal changes the way one thinks about ‘What are we doing here?’ 43:33 I used to be very materialistic.  I’m less so.  Not that I’m not entirely but I’m less materialistic.  I’m much more interested in knowing truth.  I’m seeking wisdom.  I’m seeking knowledge. I’m seeking stuff that has permanence and eternal value rather than transitory things. When my father passed away in 2016, having a faith made such a huge difference to the way I experienced that as it did for my dad because my dad was a strong believer right at the end. Knowing that my father was a believer in Jesus meant that I knew I would seem again. I knew that he was in a good place.  Sometimes at funerals people will say things like ‘I know he’s looking down on me’ or ‘I know I’ll see him again’ but how do you know that?  How can you be sure of that?  Well, as a Christian I can say that and mean it. Jesus raised from the dead and he showed us that that’s what’s awaiting all of us.  Although that was a very painful experience, having that knowledge really impacted the way I viewed my father’s passing and the way I still view it.  It’s a good thing. 45:14 My character changed. I was a racist. I really was.  I was pro-abortion. I remember one of my friends at school I’ve got a girl pregnant and very much encouraged him to push to get her to have an abortion.  I was very hedonistic.  I wanted pleasure of any kind no matter what. That’s all changed.  That’s all changed because as a Christian I now understand what human beings are because God made us with a purpose and he gave us great dignity.  The Bible says we’re made in his image.  There’s something special about us.  Not only that, God lowered himself to become one of us and then died for us.  We’re precious.  We’re precious from the womb to the tomb.  And everyone is precious.  Every human being is precious. Every life is important and I never used to think that way. I never used to think that way.  I know you don’t have to be a Christian to think that way, but it was my conversion to Christianity that led me to think that way.  So, there were really big shifts in my character and in the way I was thinking about the world and looked at the purpose of life. 47:42 JH: It seems that, listening to you, I’m impressed with how everything in your world is changed –  your perspective about who God is, who you are, your relationship to others, your relationship to how you think about things in the world, how you experience life.  It seems like a change, a turning over in about every area of your life.  That’s amazing!  As we’re as we’re wrapping up our time, Frank, what would you like to say to those listening to the podcast who are a bit sceptical about God and religion and Christianity as you once were 48:30 48:30 FF:  I’d encourage people to explore the evidence for themselves and to ask questions.  I know in my own case I had a lot of presuppositions about Christianity that proved to be well and truly false.  I’m wondering whether other people would be the same.   Ask yourself whether it is possible that what you think about Christianity might be flawed or actually skewed by something that you’ve heard before, some experience that you’ve had. I encouraged people to be open and to examine themselves and to seek answers to questions they might have. 49:24  I also encourage people to actually question what they actually believe themselves.  I don’t think I did that very much when I was an atheist.  It became my default position without thought.  But now I’ve thought about what I probably needed to think about much more when I was an atheist – like if I was an atheist then I need to answer questions like How is it possible that life comes from nonliving matter and energy? How is it possible that the universe came into existence out of nothing? How is it possible that consciousness can emerge out of matter and energy? Why is it that human beings actually have significance if the universe is without purpose or without a creator? How can we trust our reason and our minds if it’s product of biochemistry? How can we say that people have human rights when humans aren’t actually that special or have got no eternal value? All these kinds of things I never thought about. 50:35  What about suffering and evil? What does atheism offer in the face of suffering and evil? Nothing.  There is no answer.  There is no hope. Whereas, in Christianity God gave us his Son as the answer to suffering and evil. 51:06 I would encourage people to think through what you believe right now.  Does your worldview answer these big questions satisfactorily?  If not, consider Christianity.  One of the things I was amazed with on my journey was how many other people far brighter than me, far smarter than me who became Christians.  So many academics and scholars who are Christians in all kinds of fields.  These are thinking people.  Why have they come to these beliefs?  I really encourage people to look into that. 51:40  One other thing I would say is that when you do meet Christians, don’t judge them.  You’re not going to find any Christian who’s perfect.  No Christian is perfect.  I know I used to hold Christians up to higher standards and expect more of them and then  accuse them of hypocrisy when they didn’t live up to them.  But, please don’t judge Christianity by the behavior of Christians.   Christianity is either objectively true or it’s false regardless of what people do.  If you do encounter Christians who annoy you or who you don’t think are behaving particularly Christianly, bypass them and get to the core.  Look at the sources and see what you find there. 52:37 JH: Look to Jesus, right? and see what you find in him.  He defines himself as the truth.  So, if you’re looking for truth, look to him.   Frank, that’s stellar advice to those who may be skeptical or curious about Christianity.  What would you say on the flip side to Christians about perhaps the way that they’re projecting themselves to those who don’t believe or how would you encourage Christians you are quite the learner how would you encourage Christians to go deeper in their faith perhaps and their understanding of their own worldview? 53:26 FF: It’s really important that Christians do spend time not just learning what to believe but why they can believe it.  In I Peter 3:15 it tells us to always be ready to give an answer to those who ask us.  In my experience as a young boy and young teenager, I did not find those kinds of Christians and that put me right off because I didn’t think they actually were answers.  You never know who God might bring into your life and they might come up to you asking all kinds of questions and you need to be ready to be able to answer some of those questions or at least know where to lead them to get answers to their questions.  Today, there are so many resources available.  There are so many Christian thinkers and scholars, philosophers, apologists.  The resources online are amazing.  YouTube is a great resource. I still get got a great thrill out of watching Christians debate non-Christians and hearing both sides of an argument. I love hearing what atheists is have to say and how they challenge Christian belief.  And, I love hearing that there are answers in response to those challenges.  So, I do encourage Christians to be learners and never stop because you’ll never ever, ever learn at all.  That’s something to do right to the end. 55:04  I would also encourage Christians to listen to people. I was guilty of this myself actually as a new Christian when I was talking to people that I was so enthusiastic about sharing everything I knew that I didn’t actually stop to listen to the kinds of questions were actually being asked or listen to the stories that people had.  You can’t treat every person exactly the same way. Their particular issues, their particular experiences will need different answers or different approaches so be flexible in the way you are interact with people. 55:43 One thing that I encourage Christians to do is to actually engage in dialogue in the sense that you don’t have to be the only one to actually answer questions.   Ask questions about the person’s beliefs.  What do they think about certain things, about how the world came to be how we can know whether something is right or wrong.  Perhaps there are people out there who haven’t really thought through those issues very much and once they’re made to they might find that their ideas aren’t particularly well founded.  You don’t always have to be the one answering the questions.  You can ask and perhaps help people to think through what they believe and then be more open to thinking about Christianity after that. 56:31.  In my case it this wasn’t good and I assume for other people it might be the same, but I wouldn’t recommend  quoting scripture at people.  In my case that would never have worked because if you don’t actually believe the scriptures are reliable in the first place, quoting scriptures is not going to make any difference whatsoever.   Try and work on showing why the scriptures can be trusted first before sharing the scriptures.  That may not be applied to every person but there might be for some people . 57:28  Also don’t pretend to know answers when you don’t.  I’ve actually noticed on some  forums online watching how Christians interact with atheists and I cringe at some of the answers that I see there.  They’re not thought out.  They are just cliched.  They are very vulnerable to attack and it’s a little bit awkward and embarrassing to see that.  Sometimes it’s  better to say,  ‘Look, I actually don’t know the answer that question at the moment but I’ll find out for you.’  Sometimes it’s actually probably better to do a lot of reading first before you engage in apologetics if that’s what you’re going to do so.  Just be aware of that. 58:19  The final thing –  as far as possible, it’s important to be authentic as a Christian and that’s not easy because we’re all sinners but I know it can make a difference if people see that you’re actually living out what you say you believe.  I was very fortunate to meet someone who was incredibly gracious, generous with his time and very humble. I hadn’t really met too many people like that.  It made a difference .  It made be more willing to listen.  The Peter 315 quote it also says be ready to have an answer for everyone who asks you but to do so with gentleness and respect and I think that’s important too. 59:00 JH:  You have certainly given us a lot to think about Frank.  So much wisdom there not only from your knowledge but also your life experience.  One of the things of course that I love that you said is that we need to stop to listen and I appreciate so much your coming on today that we could really listen to both sides of your story.  There’s so much that you said, so much that we can learn from listening to you.  and again thank you so much for coming on for telling your story.  It’s going to be insightful for those who are curious you’re seeking, for those of us who have been believers for quite a while.  We’re all inspired and encouraged by your story so thank you so much for being on. FF:  yes  I really enjoyed it thank you

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

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

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

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

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