Former atheist Nico Tarquinio rejected a religion he thought was not worthy of belief.  As a lawyer, he considered both sides in a search for truth and changed his mind about Christianity. Resources recommended by Nico: Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace Letters to an Atheist, Peter Kreeft Unbelievable? Podcast with Justin Brierley Reasonable Faith Podcast with William Lane Craig For more stories of atheist and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics let the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories at our Side B Stories Facebook page.  Oftentimes, we are perfectly content in what we believe until something happens in our lives that disrupts the status quo. New circumstances arise that cause us to rethink what we think about the world around us, about our lives, about what we hold to be true or not. At those thresholds, we are presented with an opportunity to take a closer look at our beliefs, or we can continue on, presuming our pathway in life is built upon a good foundation without examination.  In today’s story, former atheist Nico Tarquinio encountered a change in life circumstances, and with that, a new opportunity to look more closely at his own and others beliefs, to search more intentionally for truth. As an attorney, he was naturally driven towards critical thinking and analyzing and debating ideas. But this journey for him ended in a place he never expected, as a strong believer in God and apologist for the Christian worldview. What did he find on his journey towards discovery that was so compelling that he was willing to move towards Christianity, a worldview he once held in contempt? I hope you’ll join in to find out.  Welcome to Side B Stories, Nico. It’s great to have you with me today.  Jana, it is amazing to join you. Thank you so much for having me on. Wonderful. So the listeners know a bit about who you are, Nico, can you tell us some about who you are, what you do, where you live?  Sure. So, my name is Nico Tarquinio. I’m currently living in Lincoln, Nebraska, but I’m from Massachusetts originally, Southbridge, Massachusetts. I’ve lived in Maine. I’ve lived in upstate New York. I’ve lived in Boston. I’ve lived in Vermont. I’ve been a lot of places, and these days I am living in the Midwest. I work for the Federal Government. I’m an attorney and, well, non practicing at the time, but I did pass the bar exam, so it counts for something. I love to do apologetics and theology in my spare time, and I’m also raising four kids in my spare time. That little hobby on the side there. So gosh, I wear a lot of hats. Sounds like you’ve got a very, very busy life, Nico. Very full. So it also sounds so that you’ve spent a lot of time in the Northeast. Is that where you were born? Why don’t you take us back to your childhood and where you were raised, that culture, your family? Was religion or God any part of your world?  Sure. So I was raised in a contentious divorce situation, so my mother and father didn’t see eye to eye. They often came to harsh words with each other, and I was primarily raised by my mother. My father, on the other hand, eventually moved to Florida for a while. My grandmother still lived in town. But my more religious side would probably be my father’s side of the family, simply because, if you couldn’t tell by my name, Nico Ramo Tarquinio, I’m Italian. And if you want Nonna’s meatballs, or at least a good conversation after she puts the meatballs on the table, not like she refuses them to anyone, you’re going to go to Mass, at least on Christmas and Easter with everybody. So that was kind of a very typical experience in the Northeast in general, but certainly within my family. And my mother, who was much more open spiritually, and she’s a very brilliant woman, but I don’t recall Bibles being in the house. I do recall seeing Tarot cards, seeing spell books. I remember her going to psychics. She was very open spiritually, and I don’t think that comes from a dark place or anything like that, but that kind of shows the kind of spiritual upbringing I had. We certainly didn’t pray over dinner or do any of the kind of things we associate with Christianity in the household. There was a little crucifix above my bed from when I was baptized. Like most Catholics and Lutherans, I was baptized as a child, but that was kind of it. It kind of becomes a point of celebration, and you get together on holidays and you go to Mass, And I would say that religion in our family was very strong, but the strongest place that it was was with my Italian Nonna, as I mentioned. The house that she lived in was full of images of Jesus, primarily. There were pictures of the saints. There were rosaries. There were Bibles. There were prayer books. There were pictures of church. It was very important to her, and she lived a very—and she still does—live a very strong spiritual in a Christian sense life. But English isn’t her first language. She spent most of her time taking care of us, and she didn’t kind of force it on anybody. It was kind of just her thing. And I remember going through my childhood seeing all these beautiful pictures on the wall, and it was almost like I didn’t see them. They were there, and I know that they were there, but I didn’t know whose faces belonged to the pictures. So when I came back as an adult and a Christian, it was just such a light bulb moment, where all of a sudden I go, “Nonna, that’s St. Anne. That’s St. Rita. That’s Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane,” that beautiful picture that looked over my bed when I stayed there. And they were beautiful works of art to me, but if anything, they were just boring old people things to me back then. The faith certainly wasn’t alive in my family. And I didn’t really even go to church on any regular basis until Confirmation rolled around, and my father had moved back from Florida and started taking me on Sundays. So even your father had some kind of appreciation for the Catholic Church or for confirmation obviously. There was no animosity towards God.  Oh. Absolutely not. No. I would say my father does believe, and strongly so. he certainly understood the need to go to church, I mean especially in the Italian culture. My actual godfather was my confirmation sponsor. It’s not just a movie stereotype. Your godfather is a part of your life, spiritually speaking. Yes. So through all that time, Christmas, Easters, Confirmation, did you ever believe any of what you were being taught in any kind of personal way? Or was it just going through the motions of expectations?  It was really going through the motions. I didn’t really talk too much about what started me on this, what kind of immunized me to receiving any of these messages. Because even on Christmas and Easter, you read from the Bible at Mass. I mean, you hear the word of God, but I zone out. I mean, it’s not something that struck me as important.  If you understand what confirmation is, I believe it’s from Acts 18 in the Bible, that’s when you really are supposed to be saying yes to God, at least in the Catholic faith. And I mean, I said it, but I said it because my parents wanted to throw a party for me after. And I wouldn’t say otherwise, of course, not to disrespect them or to destroy their expectations, but it really didn’t mean anything to me. I mean, Catholicism to me was something to mock. I was growing up was the time when we started hearing the allegations of the absolute terrible pedophilia scandals going on. So what you would think of the entire faith was just completely and utterly…. There was just no chance of me respecting it. Yeah. I would imagine, especially as you were getting into your preteen, teenage years, around that time, it was probably a little bit of an approach avoidance, I would imagine, especially with that scandal and not really thinking or taking things personally in the faith to begin with and the cultural animosity, all of those things kind of brewing together. And you mentioned something about your friends earlier. Did your friends embrace Catholicism? Or were they mocking? Or what was going on there?  When you say cultural animosity, I think you hit the nail on the head of the experience of a child being raised in Southbridge, Massachusetts, in the nineties. And I would say that’s probably true of a lot of places in Massachusetts, from what I was aware of. It’s funny, I heard an interview with somebody who was raised in the Bible Belt, saying, “Well, here in America, we still have respect for Christ,” and that certainly wasn’t the case where I grew up. Gosh, everything from the voices that I heard on the radio to things that I saw on TV to the books that I read were all steeped heavily against Jesus. I’m sure many of your viewers will be familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Absolute classic. But that book starts off with an absolute indictment of God. It’s a parody. the book starts off with an overview of the universe. It goes, “In the beginning, God created the universe, and everyone mostly agreed that that was a bad idea,” and then it quickly goes into God having an argument with somebody about why he even bothered creating them, and he disappears in, quote, “A puff of logic.” So these are the kind of voices that are in my young mind growing up, that God is incompatible with logic and reason, that it’s a book of these…. And this is when the New Atheist movement was in full swing. I mean, you hear these things about faith being belief despite the evidence from popular celebrities at the time. I listened to a lot of rock  music, and I will tell you that folks like Marilyn Manson and Slipknot were certainly not friends of the faith. And I would say that, even at a very young age, one of the experiences that I will never forget and I really do think started to just knock things loose in my mind about what I would think about Christianity. It was second, third grade, and none of my friends believed in Christianity, as far as I’m aware. I didn’t know a single person who was a practicing Christian. We certainly had folks who would also go to Mass on Christmas and Easter and who would even go to CCD class and things like that to make their sacraments. But I remember the conversation about Santa quickly shifting to Christ, because it was kind of like a: “Santa’s not real. Of course he’s not real. It’s your parents putting gifts out for you.” And then people would start talking about, “Well, what else is real? What else is not real?” And of course Jesus is going to come up. So I remember somebody at our table, our lunch table. I can see it in my mind, and I know this sounds unbelievable, but I would say depraved is a very good word for the kind of conversation you would have around the lunch table. And I remember one of the kids, popular guy, said something along the lines of, “Well, no. It’s all made up, obviously. None of that stuff happens in real life. The Virgin Mary, she either cheated on Joseph, or she was raped, and she had to make up a story so she didn’t get stoned to death.” And it’s so crazy because I think that maybe something in some of those other kids at the table, and it’s so awful to say these words, by the way, it really hurts to even say them. But I think even they felt scandalized because I don’t remember anyone saying anything, but I remember a lot of people nodding. Certainly nobody said, “Oh, no! That’s not true. This is real. No. I know it’s real.” Even if it was just, “Well, Mom and Dad say it’s true, and I know it’s true.” None of that happened. And that kind of just gets deep into your psyche when you hear things like that from a young age, especially when it goes completely unopposed by any reason to believe in any of that stuff. I mean, my catechesis going around that age, going to CCD classes once a week. It’s not exactly like…. If you’re not hearing the faith at home, you’re certainly not going to learn it in one-hour segments with a priest on a seasonal basis. My questions were never answered in a sufficient way. You’re left with these questions that just make Christianity look awful, look fake. I could go on and on, but culturally, that animosity is definitely real, and there’s certainly no incentive for… I mean, why would you believe in it if that’s all you’re hearing? Right, right. And so I guess during those teenage years, then, you pushed back from any kind of Christian or Catholic identity?  Yeah. Yeah. In both cases, especially because that was…. As things started to heat up in terms of dialogue in the United States and especially with respect to things like gay marriage, we would see the media turn especially hard against now a faith that we were seeing exposed as having a lot of horrible secrets in terms of these pedophile scandals and talking about things like gay marriage. And the Westboro Baptist Church was ubiquitous on the news for very hateful stances, not only just toward gay people, but toward veterans, toward people of other religions, toward Jewish people. So when you thought about Christians, you didn’t think about much except ignorance and hatred. Yeah. That’s a tough bill to sell, isn’t it? You don’t want to be a part of something that has so much negativity circling around it. And I would imagine, too, you were questioning whether or not He was even real, much less good. So walk us on from there. Did you outright reject it? Did you just say, “I don’t know.” How did you- It’s funny, you hear a lot of conversations sometimes when you hear debates between Christians and atheists. A lot of times you hear the Christians pose the question to the atheists, “Would you want this to be real?” And some atheists will say, especially some of the louder ones. I think Ricky Gervais is one who would say something like, “If God was real, I’d punch Him in the nose for being so evil.” But you have others who I feel like are more honest, and they say, “Well, if an all-loving God who would make me happy for all eternity existed, of course I would want that to be real.” So I think a deep part of me did want it to be true, not only just to please my family, who I’ve already had a contentious relationship with, in the sense of the divorce going on and just a lot of friction that would happen in that sense. So when I went to college, there were a few times that I went to church to try to see, “Is this for me?” I was a young adult. I didn’t have anything else to do. I was kind of nerd, so I wasn’t exactly getting invited to a lot of parties. I mean, I did end up going to quite a few over time, but I would go. And here’s the thing: It’s the Northeast Catholic experience. You go to church, and there’s one person there, and they’re probably in their eighties, and I’d go alone. And what I would hear being said—again, the backdrop is the US, and a lot of social turns going on. The priests would preach on things like gay marriage, and if that’s your experience going into a church, hearing the hellfire, but not hearing the love, it just reconfirms what I heard from all these media sources. They’re hateful. I mean I understand things in a very different context now, of course. I could speak to that. But for somebody just wandering in and not knowing what’s going on, it was strange. And so, in college, it took a deeper turn, probably even further away from faith. And I think I deeply wanted it to be true, and I wandered in every now and then, maybe seeking comfort or something. But I would do pranks. I would start doing things that—I was a comedic genius. So I would see a sign that says Keep Christ in Christmas, and I’d peel off the T, so it said keep Chris in Christmas. And I would say, “Hey, Chris, look!” And I’d do stupid things like that. Or I’d write…. Gosh, they were quotes from like Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, and this is probably a little bit more disrespectful and quite frankly evil, disrespecting Christianity, talking about how it’s false, and writing those quotes on the Facebook page under anonymous accounts and things like that. Trying to do everything… Or posting what we would say, the dark parts of the Bible, Some parts of the Old Testament, where we read about some of the wars between the Jews and the other tribes, and there were some very descriptive passages concerning the warfare going on, and it would just make it seem so awful, and I’d loudly trumpet those. So it wasn’t just that you were not believing, you were actually becoming active about becoming one of those who held animosity and mocking as well?  And you know what the most bizarre thing is? And I feel like this is actually pretty common among people in my generation. The spiritual-but-not-religious thing was there, the kind of agnostic, the kind of, “Oh, yeah. I’m open to these things. I’ll watch Ghost Adventures on TV. I’ll do a Ouija board. I think there are ghosts and demons haunting my college,” without ever realizing the natural implications of the idea that if there are demons, certainly there’s something , but you’d hear about those, and I would never make the connection. “Oh, yeah. Demons definitely exist. There’s definitely these weird ghost hunting videos, but God? No. Definitely not!” No, that’s boring. That’s stuff for hateful people. That’s Bronze Age fairy tale, as they used to say. And made up by a bunch of goat herders a long time ago just to explain the world around them. So you lived in this place of some form of rejection of this traditional, conservative, very unappealing form of belief. How long did you live in that place? And what allowed you to reconsider your thinking?  That is a really great question, because I would say I can see little drops of it as I went along my experience, where I would find myself almost—for example, once I left college and my wife and I moved to Vermont at one point, I knew somebody who converted to Christianity, somebody who was also deeply agnostic, deeply spiritual, but not religious. And he wrote a book about how he had. And I like writing, and I edit books on occasion. And he sent it to me. And all I could do after reading that was kind of mock his faith and disrespect him and say, “Oh, this doesn’t make sense,” where his journey was definitely leading him to Christ, but I just didn’t believe any of it. And as I went on my journey, though, it’s funny, I went from that to suddenly there were moments where I would find myself maybe defending the Christian worldview because I saw how maybe inconsistent the way that people treated Christians were. My wife was taking college classes on the side at a college in Vermont. And I remember at one time there was an assignment, and it was an online class, and the professor asked them to discuss and compare mythologies, and these mythologies would be Greek and Egyptian and Norse and Christian, and there were Christians in that class. And one of the other sources—I don’t know. Some of your viewers may be familiar with him, even some people who are just completely secular. There’s a guy named Dave Ramsey, a popular financial coach, and my wife and I were on our own completely, we needed to shore up our finances. And at the very end of Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace program, and a lot of times, he cites the Bible throughout it and some basic financial principles about lending and things like that. There’s a bonus episode, and if you watch the bonus episode, and we did, because we had nothing else to do, he implores the viewers to just pick up the Bible if any of it resonated with them. So my wife and I went and bought a Bible, and that was what really started to open my mind, and we started to try to read it together just like any other book. And unfortunately, again, that cultural animosity—I love those words—really came to me again because we would read stuff like Leviticus, and Leviticus would seem like it’s condemning, depending on who you listen to, lifestyles and people, instead of understanding it in the proper context that it was meant for back then. And, my goodness, it brought me right back to my childhood again. This is all just empty. This is just people trying to moralize. This is people trying to be, “I’m superior to other people because I read this book and I go to church once every few months.” There’s a quote, and I’m going to bring it up now because I think it’s maybe the most important quote to me these days, and throughout this entire experience of converting, and it’s from C.S. Lewis. In terms of how I relate to the Bible: “Christianity, if false…” is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, but the one thing it cannot be is moderately important.” But everybody in my life up until this point treated it as moderately important. “Yeah, we go to church.” But to a young mind who’s skeptical of things and who’s trying to understand the world around him, I’m studying things in school. I’m trying to understand things. Why, logically speaking, if you believe that there is a God of the universe who numbered every hair on your head, why would you go to church once every six months or so? I mean, that just seems like a waste of time, because if you care about Him, if He’s real, certainly you would be giving your whole life to Him. But if, you know, what is the point otherwise? Why not just own up to it? Don’t go to church if it’s not a thing. And anyway, so that was kind of my experience up until then. And then I read the Bible and to me, yeah, it’s just moderately important. It’s nothing. These are just people who want to moralize others. But since reading the Bible, at least, and seeing people like Dave Ramsey, who’s probably one of the first sincere Christians I’ve ever seen in media. . . gears started to move here. Well, I can’t just say, “Christians disrespect these people, so I’m going to go with these people. I’m going to protect those people from the evil Christians,” but then see somebody else going after a Christian and not say, “Hey, wait. Leave them alone. You can’t call their faith mythology.” So things started to change a little bit. Yeah, that is interesting because, again, it seemed like a bit of dissonance going on there because you’re reading the Bible and feeling it’s pulling back those negative emotions of, “This is just moralizing text,” but yet you see a counterbalance with an authentic Christian in Dave Ramsey, And it feels like two sides of a coin that don’t seem to be able to reconcile, at least at that time. But yet you were willing to contend for its viability, or respecting a Christian and their beliefs as more than mythology. So it does feel like you’re kind of wavering a little bit, going back and forth, trying to navigate these waters of what this really is.  Yeah. It was definitely a back and forth is a good word for it, I certainly didn’t as a child, which is kind of crazy when you come to know authentic Bible reading, Bible believing Christians, because, again, if it’s important, why wouldn’t you? Even if it is a hard book to read? And it started coming crashing down again, to the point where we just rejected it. I remember a couple of times in that early period of us—and I was recently out of law school. But maybe I chose a bad day because I walk in the door. My experience is this: They give us a $50 gift card to go get coffee, which okay, like, “Nice gesture, I love coffee, but, it seemed a little weird. And then we go in, and there’s an issue. And I loved the worship part. I love the music. Beautiful. Cool stuff, seeing all these people who are raising their hands, and there was something there that I admired and something that I just couldn’t understand, because I never felt that way before. But there was an issue with the projector, and the pastor started yelling at the projectionist, and it actually sounded like he threatened him, like he was going to harm him. Not only that, but the sermon, almost the entirety of the sermon was: One, you need to give more money because we’re not going to be able to keep our doors open. Two, you need to fast, because God spoke to me and says, “You in the crowd need to fast,” and now granted I believe some people hear the voice of God, not only just through reading the Bible, but I think sometimes that still, small voice is there. But as somebody who has no belief whatsoever, when you go in and somebody gives you a card to stay,  then tells you to give them money, then tells you that God told them to do something. “Don’t eat food. God told me that you can’t eat tonight.” My wife and I didn’t go back for a while, and we stopped reading those Bibles. And that led to, I would say, maybe the deepest period of atheism that I ever experienced, where I just said, “That’s it. I have no desire to go to church after that.” So you adopted an atheist identity, then. I mean, you came to a place where you basically confirmed, at least for yourself, that God does not exist, could not exist, in light of all of these things we’re observing about people who portray God or Christianity in such an off putting way. So then of course you’re no longer— I get the sense that Christianity is infinitely important for you now. So how did you make that turn or that change?  So my wife and I were married. We were married actually about a year into law school at that point. But if it gives you a sense of where we were religiously at that point, we have our vows. I actually have them in a little scrapbook over here. And my wife and I, when we were writing them, we made sure to scrub all references to God, because what did God do for us? I mean, the only people who were ever real to each other in our lives at that point were each other. So we had written God off, and we were in our marriage, we were happy with each other. And my wife had the instincts and the desire to become a mother. Thank God she did. And eventually kind of broke me down on that, where I wasn’t going to live a life of playing video games and reading books. We’re going to at least try to have at least one kid. And that prompted questions for me, deep questions, because suddenly I’m reflecting on this crazy ride I’ve had growing up and having these weird, bad family relationships, having this kind of inconsistent faith, and I thought about my family, and I thought about, “What are they going to think of us having a kid? They didn’t even approve of us getting married. Are we going to get our kids baptized?” And that brought on other questions, too, because suddenly I’m not just responsible for finding out what I believe about the universe. I have to convey that to a child. That’s a big deal to me. The whole reason that things like the pedophilia scandal are important to me is because, deep down, and we could go into the moral argument of C.S. Lewis, but children are a big deal, and the idea of being responsible for somebody’s upbringing, both moral and intellectual, it raised the question, “What do I teach them about religion, and specifically Christianity?” So that was where things started to turn and got interesting, so to speak. So how did you start to answer those questions, those big questions of what you thought about belief in God and Christianity and whether or not you were going to baptize your child, or all of that?  Research. I was a lawyer. I mean, I wasn’t a practicing lawyer. I did practice, but I eventually started working for the government, I did what any millennial would do. There’s Google. And initially my search was quite frustrated. I kept searching for things like Christian scientists, Christian celebrities, and probably because of the way the search results are stacked, I know the number of intellectuals who have shaped the world as we know it who had the Christian faith. But back then, I couldn’t find a single one. So I did the second thing that Millennials like, and that’s podcasts, and I was surprised to find that there’s quite a few interesting ones. The work that I was doing, while it was difficult, I could do it without thinking too much, so I could listen to podcasts. there was one called The Daily Audio Bible, I started listening to it because I was like, “How can I write this off and tell a kid, ‘Oh, yeah, this isn’t true,’ if I haven’t even listened to the dang Bible?” So I started listening to that. I started listening to Bad Christian, which, strangely, was with a band I used to love when I was a child. I was into a lot of crazy emo and screamo work. I actually really enjoyed their stuff, and I was just kind of like starting to come to respect some of these people. These were people I listened to. And I found out, surprisingly, a lot of people into metal music are into Christianity. And that really resonated with me spiritually at the time, because I was going through a lot of dark stuff. I was going to therapy, and I learned that as a child through some therapy about some repressed memories, there was some serious abuse going on, and that was really hard to confront. You’re with some of the darker emotions that you can feel. So while I’m going on an intellectual journey, I’m reading the Bible, I’m also spiritually starting to say, “This angst that I feel was felt by somebody 2000 years ago,” and I will say this is when the intellectual stuff coming in, too. Like I said, I was a lawyer. I wanted to know what’s the evidence. There’s other podcasts on there, and one of them, quite fortunately titled, is called Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig. There’s Unbelievable with Justin Brierley, which I actually recently was on, and that’s a debate show. And what is more appealing to an American lawyer than two people arguing? So this is kind of where I’m starting to go with this. So you were open to the evidence, wherever that led, or the arguments for the Christian worldview. You were willing to consider both sides. You were actively pursuing something, pursuing truth. What were you finding? As you were that lawyer in you who was debating both sides of the issue probably in your mind, what were you finding in terms of where was the evidence landing for you?  Well, here’s the thing: That’s where the objections started coming up, and they started coming up hard, because in my mind I’m hearing those voices from people like Christopher Hitchens and Dawkins and all these books that I’ve read, and I’m thinking, “Okay. There’s no evidence for Christianity,” but then suddenly I hear voices like Cold Case Christianity with Jay Warner Wallace, who’s a former cold case homicide detective, who says, speaking directly to me, who had just gone through evidence classes, “Well, what is evidence? Evidence is anything, anything that raises the probability that a truth claim or an argument is true.” So people say, “Oh, yeah. There’s no video of Jesus Christ being crucified and rising from the dead,” but of course there isn’t. I’ve been through trials. Even in today’s day, it’s very rare that you have a video of the murder or something happening. It’s always… and it’s funny, you watch TV shows, and they talk about circumstantial evidence like that’s a bad thing. Circumstantial evidence is how the majority of court cases are decided. Testimony is the most common form of evidence. And suddenly this starts to… I’m listening to Jay Warner Wallace talking about that, and I’m like, “Yeah, that makes sense to me. I’m trained as a lawyer. This is how we decide things.” I’m listening to debates on Unbelievable between people of different worldviews, not just Christianity and non Christians. I started hearing these arguments, and I found myself impressed by Christians, and surprisingly so. And I also at the same time felt kind of betrayed by the church that I grew up in or by people who never taught me this stuff, because I didn’t know Aquinas’s 5 ways to God, that there were proofs of God. Blew my mind when I suddenly heard, “Oh, my gosh! There’s a Kalam’s cosmological argument for God that is not only just used by Christians, but by Muslims as well!” The idea that something can’t come from nothing. You can extrapolate that to a deep philosophical proof that I had to either stop working or turn off the podcast because I can’t listen to quantum mechanics and how that interacts with philosophy and properly do my job. So I felt stupid. And I don’t often feel stupid, and I don’t want to say that to toot my own horn. I’m not an arrogant person. My wife is ten times smarter than me, I’ll tell you that. And I’m not just saying that, so I’m not in the doghouse tonight. She is a brilliant woman. But all of a sudden I’m like, “Wait a second. These people, these Christians who I was raised to believe they believe in the Bible because they were raised with it. They don’t know anything better. They reject evolution.” Turns out not all Christians do. ‘They reject all these scientific principles that I came to accept.’ And I’m not saying some of that in a derogatory way. I’m saying some of them have very good reasons to believe why they believed. And they should. I mean, it’s what? 1 Peter 3:15 or something like that, “Have a good reason to believe what you believe.” And anyway, so this is getting more intense, this search, for me. But while this search is getting more intense, something kind of hard happened, and I don’t know if you want me to go into that, but I can. Yes. What else happened? Yeah.  So, almost as if, while I’m starting to have hope that these arguments for Christianity might actually be good. And I will say that not every debate I listened to I sided with the Christian. There was many where I said, “Ah, that Christian was kind of just talking nonsense and just saying, ‘Well, the Bible says it’s true,’” which is what I always believed Christians did. But some of them genuinely had things I never considered before, like the fine tuning argument. Well, meanwhile, hardship starts to strike again in my life and while going through some dark things in therapy, my wife and I, we’re not conceiving. I mean, we’re trying to have a kid, and it’s just not happening. And there are a lot of people out there who are probably going to hear this, who have been through infertility or maybe still are and never come out of that. It’s really hard on you emotionally, even as me, as somebody who didn’t want to have a child, it really broke my heart. And seeing my wife just disappointed month after month, just knowing that this future that we had kind of planned for ourselves just wasn’t coming. It was absolutely devastating for my relationship, for my idea that maybe there is a God Who cares about us, because obviously, to the uninitiated, you often hear people say, “Oh, that bad thing happened. Well, where was God? Oh, you’re infertile. Why doesn’t God fix that?” I mean, it’s in the Bible. So much of the Old Testament deals with people who couldn’t have children. And so it’s going both ways. It’s interesting, my wife’s searching Pinterest boards and things like that for infertility resources, and you find Bible verses about God making your life fruitful, and it wasn’t happening to us, What did I do to deserve this kind of thing? So you were in a difficult time emotionally, but it sounds like it pushed you away from God. All the while, you were perhaps being positively impressed or challenged by the Christian worldview, by intellectually astute people. So it sounds like your head and your heart were almost conflicted at this point.  It was a battle. This is when I started to pray. And this is like the prayers of an idiot who never read anything about Christianity and still had that genie mindset. “God, well, if You’re real, why don’t You just reveal yourself to me? You knocked Paul off that horse. Why don’t you knock me off that horse? Strike me with lightning. Do something here. I’m reaching out. Where are You?” And I wasn’t getting anything. “God, if You’re real, why don’t you just make my wife pregnant? Show me that You’re real tomorrow.” And these are now, I understand selfish, immature, not real Christian prayers, but to somebody who doesn’t understand Christianity, they sound right. And I’m like, “Okay, well, if God is real, He wants me to believe in him, right? So where is He?” And that’s getting more intense. And I’m starting to kind of bring my wife along for the ride, because obviously she’s stuck in the same house with me. She certainly wasn’t having it. I bought her a planner once. I remember we were talking about this. It had Bible verses in it. Just to see if I could get her kind of interested. She’s like, “Why did you buy this for me? I don’t want this. Where’s God in our walk with life?” But she loves me. Somehow. She got me—we love books, too, so we love books. We love each other. We’re the Barnes & Noble one night, and there’s a bargain section. She gets me a book. It’s called Letters to an Atheist by Peter Kreeft. And she knew all the stuff that I was interested in. Now, Peter Kreeft, for those of you who don’t know, is, at least in my opinion, one of the smartest theologians of this era. And I read this book because my wife handed to me and said, “This sounds like you.” So I start reading it, and it’s a brilliant book in the sense that it’s addressed to an imaginary atheist in order to address the many questions: Why is there evil? Things like that, that were really deep to me. And I was reading this book, and it was late at night. And I remember—you have these moments in your journey that kind of stand out to you. And I remember my wife—she never slept well to begin with, and during what we were going through, emotionally speaking, she was kept up late at night, and I didn’t even care if she was awake or not. I started shaking her because sometimes I would talk her to sleep because, as you can tell, I talk a lot, and it helps people to get to sleep. You can always market this podcast after as a sleep aid if you’d like. But I told her, “I think it might be real.” I was reading the argument about the apostles and what motivated them, and I’ve already heard this a little bit from Cold Case Christianity, defending the historicity of the Bible and comparing it to other documents in the ancient world and saying, “No, this is extremely well attested stuff.” And as J. Warner Wallace put it, there’s only a few motives for people to lie or to do things, both criminally speaking and almost anything else. It’s money, it’s power, it’s sex, it’s pride. I mean, there’s a few others, but Peter Kreeft wove this into the lives of the apostles and the Resurrection and whether or not the Resurrection was fake. Did they hide the body of Jesus? Did they make up a religion, as so many people had told me, that, “Oh, yeah, they just made it up because they wanted to earn money. It’s to control you. These governments made up Christianity to keep people in line.” But you’re reading the lives of the apostles, the martyrology of them, and they died. All of them went to their death. Did they have money to gain? Did they have power to gain? Did they have sex to gain? Absolutely not. These were, some of them celibate Jews who knew that they were preaching against the most powerful empire on earth, possibly even throughout history, one of the strongest empires. They were speaking against their own religion. And why? What did they have to gain from that? They knew Jesus personally. And I know some people that are Jesus mythicists out there. I will tell you. Look at books like Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. There’s a lot of fantastic books just showing that it’s just a silly hypothesis at this point. He was somebody Who lived, and I accepted that. There was a guy named Jesus, and these apostles clearly knew Him. Somebody was writing about it, enough that we have the documents today, better preserved than most other documents throughout history. And they all died. I mean, if you put a gun to my head at that point in my life and said, “Is Jesus real?” I would have said, “No. Please don’t shoot me.” But they didn’t. They were crucified, upside down in Peter’s case. They were thrown to the lions happily, and I’m shaking my wife, and I’m saying, “This makes sense to me.” And Peter Kreeft concluded the chapter with, of course, the trilemma. There’s either three possibilities: He’s a lunatic, He’s crazy, and people are believing Him for some reason, but why would they believe a lunatic? I mean, why would they go to their death for someone who showed signs of craziness? He was a liar. He was making it up, again for money, power. What motive did He have to lie? Or He was the Lord. And man, that struck me, and I get chills just saying that, because I remember staying in that bed and just like, “Wow! What an argument, and I finished that book that night. Of course! You’ve got to keep going. And at the back of the book, Peter Kreeft, despite being a very well-known speaker and apologist, said, “If you have any questions, here’s my email,” and I took him up on that. So a lot of times when people ask me these days, “How did you become a Christian?” Well, I lost a debate. I emailed him with some objections. Oh, yeah. So you came to a place where you could no longer refuse what actually made sense intellectually?  Yeah. I sent Peter Kreeft my email, and I asked him right off the bat, I said, “Hey, I have some questions. I know you’re probably busy, but could you answer them? You did such a good job,” and nobody else—I literally was asking professors in college that I knew said they were Catholic, but they didn’t have anything for me. They had no idea. Or Christians, even just Protestants. And very few people had any answers for me. Gosh, there was even a woman at work who had a cross necklace, and she was a very devout believer. Again, I didn’t know any growing up, so whenever I met one, it was something of an oddity. You’d be like, “You really believe in this stuff.” And she’s still a friend to this day. Wonderful woman. And so, and that’s a note, by the way, for any Christians out there. If you ever wonder whether or not you should be wearing crosses around your neck and things like that, it might help somebody, because I asked her about her faith, and she helped me a little bit later on. Anyway. Yeah, Peter Kreeft, his response to me when I asked him if I could ask him questions was, “Yeah, of course! And if you have questions that Christianity can’t answer,” “You shouldn’t believe it.” I said, “What? You’re saying that if I have a question for you, and you can’t answer it, I shouldn’t believe in Christianity?” I’m like, “Well, game on, buddy!” So I took him up on that. I was kind of arrogant. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got some hard ones for you.” And, I mean, there were things, again, problem of evil. Why do all these churches disagree? And I was just blown away by his confidence there. This wasn’t a guy giving me $50 to coffee and saying, “Come to my church, and I’ll give you coffee money.” This was a guy saying, “I got nothing to lose. Christianity’s got all the answers,” and I’m like, “All right,” and by the end of that email chain, I said, “Okay. I believe it. I’ll go to church eventually,” It was enough to convince you.  Yeah. It led me to my next step. Yes. Which was?  A real prayer. Not a, “Gimme, gimme” prayer, not a, “God, where are You? Where’s Your Name in the stars?” prayer. A, “I am convinced, intellectually, God, that You exist. You don’t have to do anything for me, because You already did. You died on a cross for me, and I love You. Thank You for showing Yourself to me. I’ve been asking You all this time, and I kind of had to meet You. You left these crumbs for me, and I see that this is Your way of approaching me. Gosh, infinitely powerful God, arranging things providentially, so that I come upon these books. I mean, how else could it be?” So I prayed and I said, “God, I don’t care. You don’t have to make my wife pregnant. You don’t have to appear to me in a beam of light and say, ‘Here I am. Ask me questions.’ I really think you’re real, and I’m going to believe in you no matter what,” and so this was over a year in our journey, my wife and I. There was a lot going on that week, and it was really hard, I would say, because we had already come to terms with the fact that we weren’t having a kid. I was going to an adoption conference the very next week. I know this all sounds very crazy, but, I mean, we had an IVF appointment that Monday morning. I was praying on a Sunday. Obviously, we weren’t going to church because we didn’t really know where to start. And my wife wasn’t exactly along for the ride at that point either. And that very night, we had a big fight, right after I prayed, my wife was devastated. And I don’t blame her. I mean, she was kind of like, “How can you still have hope? I just want to have your kids. Is that really so much to ask? I just want to be a mother,” and she went to bed in tears. It was a really rough time for us. So that was a big moment. I was Christian, she wasn’t, and there was a lot going on for us in the background. So obviously you have four children, and so your infertility issues were resolved in some way. But I also wonder, your wife, who was perhaps not initially accepting of your faith, did she come to believe as with you?  There’s a quote I really love. And this is from a completely unrelated topic. It’s from, gosh, John Green, The Fault in our Stars, a fiction book, terribly depressing, beautiful book about cancer. But the quote is, I think, something along the lines of this: “I fell in love like falling asleep, slowly at first, and then all at once.” It’s just a beautiful quote about how sometimes these things happen, where we kind of edge into them. I think that describes my faith, but I think it describes her even better because of what happened. So the next day, instead of me shaking her awake and saying, “Hey, I think I believe in God,” which was a couple of months prior at that point. She woke me up, and she was just…. Okay, one, she doesn’t do that. Two, it was 4:00 in the morning, so it had to be good, right? Or bad. One of those two things. And I will never forget it. And she said, “I’m pregnant.” This is the unbelievable part, right? And she, in her hand, of course, over the bed is the pregnancy test, and it says she’s pregnant. And so there’s all sorts of questions here, right? Like, one, why is it 4:00 AM? Two, why are you testing? We weren’t even, at that point, believing that we could be capable of that. I still have the picture of her sitting in the bathroom. Both of us are bawling our eyes out, as I almost am right now, with this test in our hands that says positive. I was just celebrating. I was ecstatic. I was like, “Really?” I didn’t believe it. We were going to take three more of those that morning. So over time, we start, and it’s funny, the first time I ever prayed with her, and it’s still hard. I mean, we’re still atheist growing up, so it’s still weird, but the first time I ever prayed with her was the night before we went in to have our son Ronan. And she obviously is this first-time mom about to give birth. I mean, gosh, I would be terrified, too! So we said a prayer together, and at that point you really couldn’t ignore it. Slowly but gradually. And then I remember when I sent that email to Peter Kreeft much later, with those kids, I said, “As I write this to you, there’s a Bible by my wife’s bed stand. There’s Mere Christianity, there’s Screwtape Letters, there’s a stack. And I would have never believed this could have been her. So she is probably even more…. She helps my faith these days, not the other way around. She believes, and when my son was born, and I was holding him in my arms for the first time. I said, “Ronan, welcome to the world,” and I just pray and I say, “Thank You, God. Thank You. And I will raise him to know about You, and I will do everything I can. Please use me, use my family to spread this through the world in whatever little ways You can,” because what else can I offer? I mean, He’s God. He has everything He wants, but I can give Him my free will. And to this day, I’m trying apologetics, I hope that I can reach people. Yeah. I’m just so overwhelmed by your story. And it takes me back to that time where you, just at the thought of having children, wondering what to teach whoever this child or children were going to be, and being willing to ask the big questions, being willing to go on a path of discovery, a journey of searching. And it had twists and turns, but look at where you landed. I think God honored your journey. Obviously, you are not only convinced intellectually, but you have a very palpable passion about Who it is you believe and what you believe and why you believe it and what you want to do, like you say, with your life. It’s just extraordinary, Nico. And I’m just very taken by the full arc of it, of moving from such skeptical atheism to such profound and deep belief in God.  For someone who might be listening, and they are way back at that questioning skepticism, maybe spiritual but not religious, or even just not even imagine believing in God because of all of the awful stuff going on with the church or you name it. What would you say to someone like that? Who might be willing to take a second look.  Two big things: One, don’t assume that you understand the objections that you’re putting out for Christianity until you’ve read the other side. Seek out debates. Unless you’ve even broached the…. You don’t have to read the Summa Theologica or whatever it’s… I don’t even know if I can pronounce that correctly. You don’t have to read Thomas Aquinas. But if you don’t understand the main arguments on which Christianity is based, don’t assume you know. At least—and this is what I’ve always said to atheists. I usually give a list of books, and I’ll say… and even stuff like C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. I mean, there’s a central reading. And I never say to an atheist, “Read this and be converted.” I say, “Read this because either you’re going to convert to Christianity, or you’re not going to be converted, but you’re going to be a better person for it. You’re going to be a smarter person for it. You’re going to be affirmed in your atheism, and you’ll understand why you don’t believe what you don’t believe.” And so I would say read. And don’t just assume that this is all just Bronze Age fairy tales or all this craziness. Some of the smartest minds, I believe, in history were at least faithful. I mean, at least deist. Don’t write it off. Don’t look at the worst Christians, just like I wouldn’t look at the worst atheists as examples of atheists. And I would say, number two. This is going to sound weird. And everyone’s going to look at me and be like, “Oh, yeah. Of course, the Catholic would say this.” Don’t just read the Bible. If you’re going to read the Bible, and you absolutely should. Even if you’re a committed atheist, and you will never convert, it is one of the most important works ever composed. It’s multiple works in human history. Read it with commentary. Read it. Listen to The Bible in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz), where he’s going to explain some stuff to you, because there’s stuff in there that’s going to sound absolutely bizarre. You got talking donkeys. You got talking serpents. None of that’s going to make any sense to you. And you’re just going to do what people like I think Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller would say: “I’m not a Christian because I read the Bible.” “Well, sure you did,” but the Bible is a collection of works across thousands of years, written by different cultures for different audiences, with different understandings of the world in a different language. So to think that you can just pick up the Bible…. Now, granted, I do believe it’s inspired by God. The Holy Spirit is there. He will speak to you when you read it. I believe that 100%. And I will believe He leads you to truth through reading it. There are things I discover today, seven, eight years in, and I don’t think this is ever going to stop. I used to say to myself, “We’re going to become Christians, and then we’re going to get bored, and then we’re going to be atheist.” Anything but. We’ve never stopped reading. There’s so much. I told you I used to be into sci-fi/fantasy. Now I’m into history because there’s just so much to learn, and I feel like there’s not a Sunday that goes by where I hear something that I may have heard three times before, but I’m like, “Oh, my gosh! Not only was this a callback to the Old Testament in Isaiah 22, but this also has context from the culture going on at that time.” So my advice is twofold, again. Read, be open minded, at least try to understand what the best…. Steel man your opponents. Don’t straw man your opponents. St. Thomas Aquinas was famous for steel manning his opponents in debates before he tried to knock them down. Do the same to us. Try to knock down our arguments. Take us at our absolute best. Look at the five ways. See if you can find a way around them, because I don’t think anyone has. And actually read the Bible with a mind for being open to what it says culturally. Look into what it actually does say, and just be open minded. That’s all I would say. I’m open minded to other truth claims, too. I like reading books by atheists still. I like reading books by different denominations in Christianity. We’re made better—again, this is my lawyer speaking, in America, and this definitely—now, set aside corruption and other things like that. The best way you’re going to learn what the truth is by setting the two opposing claims against each other, and the truth always wins out. And I believe Jesus Christ is that truth. He is truth incarnate. He is the word. Yeah. That’s powerful. I think it’s very important what you’re saying, because as you have said before, I think people dismiss Christianity out of hand without a hearing, and it is important to understand what it is you’re rejecting by giving it due diligence, without just rejecting it out of hand. So I appreciate your encouragement there.  So for the Christian who’s listening, and they know a skeptic in their life who seems to be perhaps where you were way back when, and they want to somehow engage them in a meaningful way, what would you encourage them to do or to say?  So much. we are in an age of hyper skepticism. So my advice is this: If you are a Christian, “Be prepared to have a reason for why you believe.” When I teach my fifth grade class, But I would say, “Why are you Christian?” That was my first question. And so many of the answers were, “Well, because Mom and Dad told me I have to be,” and I want to teach these kids, even if their answer is, “Because I think it’s true.” Well, why? And I think that’s something that we have to be prepared to give to others, too. And it can’t simply be because the Bible says so. And I see that in online comments all the time. And as somebody who once heard those arguments, that was the worst argument. That was the one that you just wrote off  just going to say, “Oh, yeah. The Bible says it’s true.” Because as an atheist, one of the objections was often, “Well, why aren’t there other things besides the Bible?” long story short, you’ve got to be ready to explain why is the Bible a reliable source if you’re going to want to point them to that. So for Christians out there who want to kind of bring their atheist friends along for the ride, what you can do as a Christian is knock down the obstacles, the walls that humans put up. You see it in the Bible. It says there are going to be people who don’t understand why you believe what you believe, and you need to be ready to account for that.  I’ve actually heard atheists argue to me that the Big Bang is evidence that Christianity doesn’t exist. And I think that’s absolutely hilarious, because those who actually understand it know that George Lemaitre—I don’t know if I’m pronouncing his name right—was a priest, and he was scoffed at by other scientists as trying to backdoor creation into his scientific theories. So anyway, just be ready. prepare your teenage kids when they go onto the world, and even before that, for the challenges that they’re going to ultimately be raised with. And we can’t force them to believe. That’s one thing to always understand. You can’t force a kid to believe. In fact, if anything, that’s just going to make it worse. You can’t give them a $50 coffee gift card and say, “Come to church.” That’s not going to work. You have to convince them. And that starts in your own home, and it starts with the way you live your life. Do you act as if…. It really starts with whether or not you live out those words, that the only thing that Christianity cannot be is moderately important because it’s infinitely important. You’re going to be at church every week. You’re going to be praying every day. You’re going to be talking to the God who knows every single thought that you have in your head, and you’re going to be living your life accordingly. If your kid—kids smell insincerity, and if they see mom going to church, but dad staying at home and watching football or playing video games or something like that, they’re not going to believe that. So I would just say live consistently. Be ready with apologetics to the best of your ability, not to convince them, just to be able to show them, “Oh, no. There is a basis for what I believe.” And yeah, just have an understanding of why you believe what you believe. You can’t just say, “Well, why is Christianity true? Because God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” You’re not going to win anybody over with that. I’ve seen people try. It wouldn’t have won me over. It’s not going to win anybody else over. You can’t just throw what they already don’t believe at them and hope for it to land. You have to tell them why should I believe that? Yeah, that’s all very, very wise advice. I can tell, again, that you see Christianity as something as infinitely important and that it shows in your life. And I think your admonition to us as Christians is for us to think and feel it, live it, to breathe it, for it to be so much a part of our lives that it’s undeniable and that it’s important to us and that it’s life changing, not only that God exists, but that He matters and it makes all the difference.  So thank you so, so much, Nico. I have loved our conversation today, and I really genuinely appreciate you coming on to tell your story.  Keep doing the ministry that you’re doing. It’s so important in the world today. Somebody like me is going to pick up your podcast, and they’re going to listen, and hopefully they’re going to find the support that they need and they’re not finding anywhere else in their lives. So thank you for what you do. And God bless you and everybody listening. Thank you for sitting through this, even if you think I’m full of baloney. Thanks so much, Nico.  Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories hear Nico’s story. You can find out more about Nico and the resources he recommended in this episode in our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this podcast, you can contact me through our website at www.sidebstories.com Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with one of our former atheists with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. I hope, if you enjoyed it, that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Former skeptic Ken Boa put aside his childhood faith and became a secular humanist who tested his philosophy through psychedelic drugs. After an agonizing search for meaning, he came to believe in the reality of God. Ken’s Resources: www.kenboa.org Resources recommended by Mark: Escape from Reason, Francis Schaeffer The God who is There, Francis Schaeffer Works of C.S. Lewis For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well.  It’s often the case that what someone believes or is taught as a child begins to fade as they encounter other ideas or other people that seem more sophisticated, more adult, more true. It becomes easy to leave childhood ideas behind, to be put on the shelf as a remnants of an outgrown time. But what happens when someone begins to find holes in their new way of thinking? When it, too, doesn’t seem to answer the big questions of life as well as they might think? What happens then? Returning to childhood beliefs seems off the table. Yet living in the tension of intellectual dissonance and existential dissatisfaction is not an option either. Perhaps indifference or distraction is the answer, confronting the tension by avoiding it.  In today’s story, philosopher, theologian, and former skeptic Dr. Ken Boa once rejected his childhood Christian beliefs for more adult-seeming secular humanism and experimentation with Eastern mysticism and even occultism. He continued to be unsettled by the inability, though, to explain things like the ineffable quality of beauty or his deep need for meaning. But these conundrums were not enough for him to search for the God of his youth. What happened, then, to compel him to a profound belief in the God that he had left behind? I hope you’ll join in to find out.  Hi, Ken. Welcome to Side B Stories. It’s so great to have you with me today!  Thank you. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?  Yeah. I often describe myself as a writer, speaker, and teacher, and a mentor. In a broader way, though, I’m a bit of an odd duck, insofar as I love to process things with people. I use beauty, and I use goodness, and I use truth, and I seek to winsomely draw people through narrative and through story. I want people to learn how to love well, learn well, and live well. Can you give me an idea, also for the listener to understand, your academic background? Yeah. Well, as an undergraduate I went to Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio. And another thing about me, I’m a philosopher of science. I was drawn to astronomy and math and physics and so forth. But then I started at graduate school at Berkeley in California. But then the oddest crazy thing, many things happened that led me instead to go to Dallas Theological Seminary. This was a long time ago, and I got a Masters of Theology there. And then working with different organizations. But I eventually started teaching at the King’s College in Briarcliff Manor, New York, when it used to be up there. And I was going to NYU to work on the philosophy of religion, so I completed my PhD from that. And then, some years later, about ten years after that, I wanted to go to England and just take a sabbatical. So what ended up as a sabbatical turned out to be actually going to Oriel College at Oxford, and ultimately I got my DPhil in philosophy and theology. Okay. So, Ken, you obviously have studied at the highest levels, at Oxford, areas of philosophy and theology, but you didn’t start there. And so I’d like to go back to the beginning of your story and see how those atheistic views developed. Why don’t you start us back into your childhood, your family of origin. Give us a sense of the home in which you were raised, whether or not God or religion was part of your family life, part of your culture life. Why don’t you start us there?  Yeah. As I’ve looked back, I recently realized—I didn’t know this until recent inquiries that I was actually baptized in the Episcopal Church when I was four years old. My father was a bus driver in New Jersey, and he was a very, very witty and clever man, and people loved him, and he apparently had one of his passengers. He must have gotten close to him and had an impact on him. And so my father started going to that Episcopal Church. And so my godfather was this man, this other fellow. But when he died of a brain tumor not long after that, my father lost his best friend, and his whole role then with regard to God was one of bitterness. How could God allow that to happen? And so that was his narrative. The net effect was that I still remember vaguely going to that Episcopal Church. I was about four or five. I remember what it looked like. It was a strange experience. And then I also remember my parents sending my older sister and me to church. It was a Baptist church that we had to walk by ourselves. This is in the ‘50s, and so these things were done then, but we walked by ourselves almost 2 miles to this Baptist church, and we had to go to a Sunday school class, and then we’d come back together. But my parents never went to church at all at that time. But it was a strange thing, hearing those—I still remember the lessons, the flannel board teachings. I still remember the songs we sang. So it obviously had a big mark on me in some ways. And then also my grandmother had a huge impact, and she was definitely a strong believer. So there were those influences there. And one of my uncles as well. So it was there, but it was not something that was fed in my home. So as a child, would you say you had some kind of childhood belief in God? That God was real, that God was there? Yeah, I did. And we talked about these things. But my sister and I were in a world of fantasy and imagination a lot, and we got this set of book trails that was an eight-volume collection of stories, and I used to read them out loud to her. And it was a magical thing. So we were very much in the mind of the imagination. But in that understanding, we were believers, in that God existed and so forth. That’s an interesting thought. Though I didn’t carry it to its logical conclusions. Though I remember having some experiment with prayer when I was about seven, I think, when I asked God if He could send me a million dollars, and I had heard that, if you believe, if you have enough faith to believe it. So imagine my disappointment the next morning. So that kind of changed when the obvious would have occurred. But I knew I believed in God. Although I had strange dreams. I still remember at the age of six having a dream about infinity. The number one got oppressively large and larger and larger until I woke up in terror. So this idea of the ineffable, of the mysterious, this has been a motif in my journey, from that inception. I can remember. I was drawn and terrified, both in that dream and also in my experience with the mysteries of nature. That seems to be a motif in my life. So I believed in God in  that sense. But your father, in some sense, had rejected, and both of your parents, neither one of them went to church. And so you and your sister walked to church, and you were developing a childhood belief but also an appreciation for the grandeur and mystery of the transcendent.  And so how long did that continue until you started becoming skeptical of what you were seeing or thinking?  Well, what happened, we went from Dumont, New Jersey, and later on we went… as a period, we went to Louisiana. My mother is from there. So I lived in two worlds, the Monroe, Louisiana, which was actually going back like thirty years in the past. And we would go to a church there. My grandmother would take us to a church, and so forth. But when we came back to New Jersey, my parents again sent my sister and I to church, so we went to this Emerson Union Church. But later a new pastor came, and it was Emerson Bible Church. And the pastor was a graduate from Dallas Theological Seminary. I was fascinated by him, and he had a good mind. And what happened was I had two sets of friends by the time I went to high school. I went to Hackensack High, a big school. And my friends there were not believers, my closest friends, but my friends at Emerson Bible Church were. And I was involved in even Christian Service Brigade, which was this Christian version of scouting, boy scouting. And my friends, they’d have stories. We’d have a story and games and so forth. And sometimes then they were going into this back room, and they’d come out and say they received Jesus. And so I was the last one left. I figured I’d better do it, too. So I went in there, and I heard a guy say a prayer. I listened to the prayer and said, “Yes,” but it was his prayer. It was not really my own invitation, but more an intellectual reception, rather than a personal embrace. And that was a real problem for me, because I thought I had the real thing, but it wasn’t real. And a real profound inner tension that produced. It wasn’t real because obviously it was another person’s prayer. You accepted it intellectually, but not personally.  That’s correct. So for those who don’t really understand the difference there, they might think just you’re a Christian just because you believe certain tenets.  Yeah. It’s a matter of not believing about, but trusting in. And this whole idea of a transfer of trust, a choice, a will, rather than just an intellectual acknowledgment of a thing, became a very, very different thing indeed. It’s more a matter of a choice that you’re making, not just an intellectual acknowledgment. There’s a big difference. Right. And so you never made that personal faith decision, trust in, what you believed.  Yes. Although I wrote in a Bible the next year, when I was I think 14, “I received Jesus as my personal Savior.” So I knew the words, but I didn’t have the reality. But I could not in my heart of hearts acknowledge that, because then I’d say, “Man, none of this is true then.” So the interior tension terrified me, and sometimes his sermons would terrify me, because then I’d have to work up with some experience, emotional experience, to believe I was still there. It was a strange experience for me to be in that. So I was two different people. So with your more secularized friends, you were thinking more maybe scientifically, more in a way towards the natural world as ultimate reality?  Well, in part. Yeah. They were more into music and also into history. they were secularized. They loved great music and art and so forth. And it was a different kind of music, a different kind of an art, a different kind of an ethos than I saw at Emerson Bible Church, which was very thin. And so I was drawn more to the life of the mind and of the aesthetic dimension of beauty, again. So I became two different kinds of people. I was terrified, though, that two of them would ever meet each other. I wouldn’t know how to respond. I’d be two different people. So there was this dichotomy for a while, a cognitive dissonance for a while, and so did one end up kind of winning over the other in terms of-  Well, here’s what happened. Yeah. You can’t live that way. Right.  So I’m an old guy. It was in the fall of ‘63, then, that I went to Case Institute of Technology. And I remember being in the dorm, and I would still read my Bible as a kind of perfunctory thing before I’d go to sleep, and I decided I was going to go to a church. It was an embarrassing experience for me. It was some kind of fundamentalist kind of experience, and I was burned by that. And so I formally took my Bible, and I remember this moment. It was an amazing thing that I took it and put it on the shelf. I can see myself doing it. It’s an iconic moment. Sometimes time is frozen on a particular image, and visually, you take a photo. I put it in the shelf. And it was symbolic of the fact that I won’t deal with this anymore. I’m going to move on, and I’m going to bracket God’s existence or nonexistence, neither accepting nor rejecting, because I didn’t want to deal with that internal tension that was too great. So I just decided. So it was more of a—scientific humanist was my modality. Okay. So you put God on the shelf, literally and spiritually and figuratively, and all of it.  In all respects, yeah. And that’s why I say I bracketed God, by which I mean I didn’t want to deal with the questions of: Who am I? Why am I here? Where did I come from? Where am I going? The fundamental issues of life. Because I knew in my heart of hearts I didn’t have answers. And I still remember, and I was at Pi Kappa Alpha in the fraternity, and my weekend blew apart when I was 19, a sophomore. All my plans went apart, and I was the only one in the house. And for the first time all these issues of questions about life imposed themselves, and it was a terrifying thing. I still remember that awful experience. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know where I came from and where I’m going. And so I said I’m never going to do that again. So, like, as Pascal predicted, indifference and distraction became my modality after that, and I made sure I would never let that happen. I didn’t want to think about it. Yes. Now, you had mentioned that you were drawn to the life of the mind, and that evidently wasn’t in the world of Christianity that you had experienced. So I’m imagining that there weren’t any more intellectual Christians in your world to whom you could go and discuss God or Christianity or these larger questions with a Christian for whom you respected or could find, I guess, intellectual fodder at the level at which you were processing ideas. Is that right?  Yeah. I’d say that would be true. The life of the mind, I found it to be somewhat anemic in those contexts of the church experiences I had, though there were men—and I will say this—godly men and women, especially these men who took me under their wing and became like mentors to me. I still remember them, and they were part of my journey. So it was a very real sense, because of my scouting and also in my Sunday school classes. These were men that I did admire. They had a quality in them, but they were ordinary men. They were not extraordinary in their way of thinking or apprehension. So it didn’t satisfy the level of understanding or beauty, because I was drawn to beauty, and to beautiful things. I became a lover of great, beautiful books, for example, and aesthetic things of that nature. So that’s where I found—my two best friends were both people who loved beauty and weren’t as concerned about truth. They were more concerned about beauty and goodness in a certain way. It’s an interesting thing, but there was a sort of mystery that was there. Right. And so as you were moving into this more aesthetic, ethereal world that was secularized, I’m curious. Because they weren’t as concerned about truth, but there has to also be a grounding of goodness and beauty. Was that anything that caused any kind of cognitive tension in terms of the grounding? Or when you’re looking at something like you were looking at the sky earlier, and you feel the power of what you’re seeing, that it has to come from somewhere or be grounded in something? Or was it just it just was?  That is why I didn’t want to think about it, because I knew it was pointing beyond me, beyond to something that was ineffable. And I was terrified of ineffability because I didn’t want to think about those categories because they reminded me of the internal turmoil underneath, where I knew I was an impostor. I was pretending to be what I was not, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. So that was a very real dilemma for me. But you said, in Pascalian terms, you became distracted, right? With things.  Indifference and distraction. Indifferent and distracted, yes.  And so my way then would be to make sure I didn’t think hard about those questions anymore.But the point is, I cannot help but think about meaning. I’m haunted by it. So that’s what’s going on. And so I think it is the Hound of Heaven and God Who stoops to conquer, and in my case, He stoops to conquer. And so he used, of all things, then, the psychotropic drugs to make me to become aware of a realm that I had been trying to occlude so successfully for a good period of time. And it was in my junior year at Case Institute of Technology that I began to get involved with hashish and with grass, and then later with LSD, and so that opened up an entirely different world. That was a whole new realm. And so, through psychedelics, was that pursuit of meaning beyond the imminent world? Or was it just distraction?  No. It was not that. It was the pursuit of a new kind of another- Level of consciousness?  Yeah. As well as the synesthesia. And I have to say it was a pleasurable experience, the synesthesia, where you hear color and you see sound, and your senses are moved together, and everything comes together. There are reasons why that occurs, but in those conditions, I found it to be very compelling, very drawing, and so it forced me in, and so we were doing experiments with time even. And I experienced a very different experience with even time. It dilated. We would actually be able to go into a dark room and take a cigarette and write a word, a short word, and it would linger. You could see the thing. It was a very intriguing experience indeed. Yes.  So we were doing experiments with that and with different aspects of consciousness. After all, we were scientists, so we tried to control the variables and so forth. And we believed in Timothy Leary’s idea. So it was experimentation, and that’s what it was. In consciousness. So sometimes in those experimentations, or in psychedelics, people will get a sense of the other, like more than the natural world, that there is definitely something more than just what our senses… that there’s something more. Did it make you question again the possibility of God, based upon your experiences?  Not so much that. It made me aware of the mysteries that surrounded me, but I still didn’t connect them to transcendence. But here’s what happened on one particular occasion: For the very first time, I went away from other people on a trip. It was a duplex, but the second floor, and I remember going away from the other guys, and it was a journey. It took me a world to get up to the top of those steps, as my hand is going into the wall and yet it’s not and so forth. And I finally see myself in the mirror, and it was an incredible flash of complex geometries and so forth. But then I found myself for some reason meandering to the end of the hall, which I never would do. I went to my friend Ray Musselman’s bedroom, and I found myself on lying on his bed, and suddenly it happened. I was aware of the presence of the holy, and I was terrified and absolutely drawn to Him. It was both the mysterium tremen—it happened again, but more now fully. It was so intense. I don’t know how long it must have been. It must have been about maybe 15 minutes it lasted, because it was long enough for Ray to come upstairs after a while and wonder where I was. Right.  But I was pinned on that bed in ineffable terror and longing. And I realized that there was a separation from that which… but I wanted it more than anything else, this being. And so my friend Ray comes to me and says, “Where have you been?” “I’m talking with God, Man.” That was my answer. So that, and every time subsequent, every time I dropped acid after that, whether I was with people or not, the most important part was to deal with the ineffable, the mysterium tremendum. Now, I’m just thinking of the listeners here, that they would say, “Well, you just were hallucinating. You were on acid.”  So it would seem. One would imagine. Yeah. How can you differentiate between that which was a hallucination and that was the real?  What happened is I had to go back to Cleveland to do one thing. It was right after graduation. So I went back to Cleveland and saw my friends, and there were about eight of us who dropped acid together in that same place. And one of them I didn’t like. I was just going to avoid him. Of course, you can guess what happened. As we get further and further, I get drawn to him, and I realized why I didn’t like him. Because he was a mirror image of myself. Because, at the age of 13, he too had the same experience. We had a profession of faith in Jesus, but he realized it wasn’t real, and it forced me, after eight years, to have to admit that I didn’t either. So for the first time we both became aware, through each other, why we didn’t like each other, because we were reminiscent of the same process and the same problem. We both found ourselves suddenly on the road less traveled. We were heading toward the road. We were on a road, and we could see that road. We couldn’t put on the brakes. We couldn’t stop. A forced choice was made. We both took the road less traveled the same moment in time. And we were then instantly as straight as we are now in this room. All the hallucinations were gone, and it was replaced by the power of the Spirit, who brought to mind the scriptures we’d learned as kids, because we’d learned the same texts of scripture. I’d share a verse, and he now, as a new believer, having found Christ, would understand its meaning for the first time. And he was blown away. Then he’d share one with me. And it was back and forth, back and forth, until the joy became so intense we literally couldn’t stand it. We had to back off. And when we backed off, the trip came back. And then we’d get back into the scriptures, and then it would be all focused on that again. All night long. And I went to church for the first time the next morning. That was a Saturday night. And I remember going there late for the service, it turned out. I don’t even know how I got there. I was in the balcony, and I just remembered the sermon started, and it was on the prodigal son. So it was a lovely theme for me. But that night, on that experience, I knew I was going to go to Dallas Seminary, not because of an inference, but because of an assurance. This book is God’s blueprint for living. That was a metaphor. “This is His proof, and I’ve got to learn what it says.” Not to be prepared for ministry, just to get my head screwed on right. So I came back, and I made an application, though I had applied to Berkeley and Columbia and had been admitted both places. I also put in my application to Dallas Seminary. But it was a profound experience, with a witness who had the same experience as well. And I’ve talked with him recently about that. I never heard anything like it. Right. No. So it’s almost as if you had had some kind of intellectual assent younger, earlier in your life, but there was no palpable reality of God, whether it be personal or otherwise.  Precisely. And then later you have this extraordinary experience of God, where you could not deny the palpable reality of God, so it was where truth and reality came together for you, and I presume all of the dissonance you had felt prior somehow coalesced into a wholeness of all of those big questions of life that you were talking about, identity and meaning and all of those things. Were they met with some kind of almost a sudden satisfaction through the person of God? You knew who you were. You knew where you were going. You completely immediately changed your path.  Yes. I was a new creation. But it launched a journey, an agonizing journey, of conscious worldview transition that lasted about a year. I’m sorry to say this. I’m not recommending this. You need to understand this. It is not a recommendation. It is just a realization. That’s why I almost never tell this story, because people get the wrong idea. I’m saying God stooped to conquer. And that is an important word for people to hear. I’m reporting what happened. It was radical. So it was a year I was there, and it was in the fall of that year, the next year, so I’d been there a year, it all came together. I had an epiphanic experience that was not just in the mind, but shivered my being, my body, my mind, everything. Everything in this epiphany of sudden recognition. After about a year of being there, it all came together. Suddenly I had a worldview that was coherent, consistent, clear, and comprehensive. It all fit together. I had been reading Schaeffer’s…. His first book came out, Escape from Reason, in ‘68. And I found out about this guy I’d never heard about, C.S. Lewis, so I was reading Lewis and Schaeffer and so forth, The God Who Is There and so forth. But it took that long. It was an agonizing process until it all came together in a coherent whole. And it was the most satisfying. It was visceral, not just cognitive, and I was immersed in the beauty, the splendor of mystery, and it was ethereal. It was luminous. I was in this thin place between heaven and earth, where it was a numinous encounter with the living God. So it was grace to have other experiences of this nature that have been very powerful for me. So when everything coalesced for you in terms of the Christian or the God-centered worldview, and everything made sense, and it was comprehensive and cohesive, and it corresponded with reality, all these other things, the mysticism in terms of Eastern mysticism, your occultism, your use of psychedelics, those…. I would presume as your Christian worldview got stronger, you were able to see that those were not based in truth or you were willing to give those up as your understanding of the true reality solidified, that those kind of went away as not part of the true truth.  It sounds like God was taken off the shelf for you in a very, very powerful way and has informed all that you’ve done since, both you and your wife, in your life.  Yes. So that’s why I love the life of the mind and the heart. I love the interior of the beauty and the goodness and the truth. And I love the heart, the head, and the hands. Being, knowing and doing. Loving well, learning well, living well. And so all truth connects together, so as a synthesizer, I see them all together, and I love to connect things with things in disparate ways, because whether it’s music or literature or film or poetry or architecture or whatever it is, beauty always points to the ineffable One, Who made it all. So everything connects, everything relates in that way. It’s a lovely way of being. Yes. And I would imagine, too, as compared to the lack of finding those in the community of Christianity who did not have a fostered life of the mind, it seems as if you’ve been a leader in that field now and have probably found strong community with those who call themselves Christians but have a very strong life of the mind. Now, all that I’d ever learned about music and art and literature all converged in this one. And so I see myself, then, as one where all these fields kind of point in integrated ways, and I love to connect disparate things and put them together. So I say that the heart cannot rejoice in what the mind rejects. Now there are, I would imagine, some curious skeptics listening today who really respect who you are, in terms of your ability to see and to experience things in very deep and  grand ways. And I wonder if they’re curious, that you have obviously found a worldview that makes sense of who you are and what you see and what you experience in reality in the world. And it makes sense for you. How could you advise or encourage someone who is curious but yet skeptical, as you once were, to continue to seek to find as you did?  Yes. Because I think that is the issue. You just said. Those who seek will find. Those who ask, it will be given to them. Those who knock, it will be opened to them. There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who seek to know God and those who seek to avoid Him. And both will succeed in the end. So this whole idea then is what do I seek? Is my aspiration big enough? Because I’ve claimed that no earthbound felicity can sustain the awful, awful freight of human aspiration because we are bearers of the imago dei, and therefore, to avoid God is to actually deny ourselves. And so to pursue Him is actually to discover ourselves, by losing ourselves and finding Him. And frankly, everyone admits that personhood is better than the impersonal, in their practice. Everybody admits that. They just don’t want it to be true of the universe. And the reason for that is because personhood is daunting. The creator of beauty displays the ugly, the source of goodness reveals evil, and the author of truth exposes error. for those who are seeking, as you kind of experienced or spoke of, you used the word terrifying a few times. It does seem a little bit frightening, a little bit terrifying to pursue the One Who is all and is in all and above all and through all and overall. But it’s worth it!  Well, it is worth it. And for the Christians who are listening who want to help lead or foster skeptics towards looking and seeking towards God, how would you best advise Christians to engage with those who are skeptical?  I think asking these fundamental questions. And there’s three of Jesus’ questions. These three questions, if you don’t mind, I’ll show them to you. What do you seek? Who do you say I am? And you love Me more than these? So, “What do you seek?” is for me the most fundamental question that determines what you find. What are you looking for, you see? And is it big enough to sustain you? So I think a prayer, even the desire to be pleasing to Him is pleasing to Him. And so I think an offering would be to say, “Lord, I don’t know if I believe in You, but I want to discover if You are Who You claim to be, and just give me the grace of knowing You as I pursue this.” So as you study scripture or expose yourself to something that you’re just inviting the grace of holy desire. Yeah. Who do you say that I am?  Yeah. Here’s the thing about this: This isn’t an optional thing. Everybody, if Jesus is right, and this is the Pascalian wager, of course, that the one who doesn’t believe in God gets nothing of gain, but the one who does gets everything. But if he’s right, Jesus is going to be the judge, as well as the lover of our soul. So He comes in his first advent in humility, but ultimately we will all have to give an answer to, “Who do you say that I am?” And every tongue will acknowledge. It would be mighty smart to be willing to acknowledge Him now and bow the knee now, because ultimately we will. You can’t be on a road without making a decision. You need to make an informed—and this is my word. I appeal to people’s pride. And I mean by that that you owe it to yourself, if this Person has shaped the world in so many profound ways as He has, ancient, medieval, and modern, you owe it to yourself to at least hear what He had to say of Himself before you decide to accept or reject. But you will either accept or reject. You don’t have an option. You will. So wouldn’t it be wise for you to choose whether to have an informed opinion as to whether to accept Him or reject Him? That’s why we created this little thing, Jesus in His Own Words, which is that’s exactly what it does, is it gives them the way of actually having to understand that. Yes. What you’re saying, too, just reminds me a little bit in your story, where you were talking about that there has to be a choice at some point in the road. Right.  That’s right. It was the two roads diverge, and I can say it now. How long has that been? Fifty five years, is it? I mean, it’s scary to think because how brief the earthbound sojourn is. But if we should always be amazed at the brevity. We’re in our last days. Never presume a year. So wouldn’t we be wise then to see there were defining moments in the journey of our lives? But if you can’t avoid a choice of Jesus permanently. You can only say no so many times. I don’t know, for example, when we were in that experience. And what if we hadn’t chosen the road less traveled? Would that have been our last opportunity? I don’t know that. But there is a last. There’s one step too far, and a person can say no only, and then their heart will be hardened. So this is not just a game we’re playing. This is a reality that you have to engage in, and at least if you make an informed decision about whether Jesus is Who He claimed to be or not, but you will have to accept it or reject it. And your story, Ken, has given us so much to think about today, so many big issues of ineffability and beauty and goodness and truth and just experiencing the reality of God and what we are seeking, Who we are seeking, and who are we. I think everyone who will be listening to your story will be asking themselves the same questions that you were asking yourself. And I appreciate you bringing these big and grandiose, yet very, very personal issues to bear to all of us.  So I really appreciate your story, Ken. I know that it’s going to touch some lives out there of those who are, God willing, seeking and that they will find. So thank you so much for coming on with me today.  Thank you. Wonderful.  It’s a pleasure to be with you. Appreciate it. Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Dr. Ken Boa’s story. You can find out more about Ken, his podcast, the prolific number of books he’s written, as well as his ministry, Reflections, at his website, www.kenboa.org, which I’ll also include in the episode notes.  For questions and feedback about this episode, you can leave a message on the Facebook page, as well as contacting me through our website at www.sidebstories.com. Also, if you are a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Everyone in his town knew Roger Sherrer as “the community atheist.” He thought belief in God was not only childish but bad and needed to be taken down. His atheism began to break down as he suffered the consequences of his nihilistic worldview. Resources recommended by Roger: Hugh Ross, Reasons to Believe, https://reasons.org William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, https://www.reasonablefaith.org Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well.  When someone takes on an identity, whether it be atheist or Christian, we often have presumptions of who they are. That works both ways. At least we think we know who they are, and they think they know who we are. We think we know what they think, how they feel about things. We presume that they will always be like that and that they will never change. And vice versa. But if you get to know someone, and they get to know you, oftentimes our perceptions will change as we begin to reveal the persons we are below the persona, below the presumed negative caricatures and stereotypes. Sometimes, underneath a hard exterior and strong anti-God sentiment of an atheist, lurks the unexpected, softer side of someone who has the same human needs and desires for truth, meaning, value, and love as everyone else.  In today’s story, former atheist and strong anti-theist Roger Sherrer thought belief in God was not only childish but bad and needed to be taken down. Now, he is just as passionate about his belief in God and is an apologist for the Christian worldview. What could move someone from such an anti-God vitriol to becoming such a strong advocate for Christianity? I hope you’ll join in to find out.  Welcome to the Side B podcast, Roger. It’s so great to have you with me today!  Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Jana. I’m honored to be on here with you. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, Roger, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps- Sure. I’m a youth pastor. I’m in Lebanon, Missouri, and so here in the Midwest. We’ve got a church, on average, I would say youth wise, we run about 200 on a Wednesday. So a lot of fun that we have here in our youth group. But beyond that, I’m also a college student, and so I recently finished my undergrad at Liberty. And my degree is in Christian ministries and currently working on my masters right now and doing my thesis. And my masters is in apologetics, also from Liberty. So that’s kind of what I’ve been doing the last couple of years. Okay. It sounds like you’re very, very busy.  Yeah, I like busy. All good ministry is busy ministry. So it’s fun. Yes. That’s great. Well, let’s walk back into your story and your childhood, because obviously you have experienced a period of disbelief. But as it stands now, it appears that you’re a very strong believer and a strong advocate of the Christian faith. So let’s walk back into your childhood and tell me about—did you grow up in that area in Lebanon? Or in the Midwest? Tell me about your home, your culture. Was Christianity or God a part of your upbringing?  Yeah. And so no, I guess, would be the short answer. And it’s been what I tell people about my family. My mom and my dad were divorced, and so I kind of had two families. But I tell people there’s two people that have never heard me preach the gospel. Of course, I’ve preached on Sundays. I’ve preached on Wednesdays. But my mom or my dad are two people, they’ve never heard me give a message. They’ve never heard me give my testimony. And that is something, growing up, being very distant from church, organized religion, certainly something that we did not adhere to, and so what kind of started as unbelief growing up in Missouri, really transitioned from just almost an agnostic, “I don’t know if there’s a God. I don’t really care if there’s a God,” turning into a version of anti-theism, in which my identity going into high school really was predicated upon, “There is no God, and not only do I believe there’s no God, but if you believe in God, then you have inferior intelligence. You are a weak person. You are emotionally, mentally, psychologically, intellectually subpar.” And so my identity, people that knew me in Lebanon, which is a town of about 15,000 or 20,000 people, I was kind of known as the community atheist. That was really something that people knew me as. And so that very much was my testimony up until about my junior year of high school. In terms of growing up in church, there certainly was no church component in my life. So what did your parents believe? Did they have any animosity towards God or religion? Or was your home irreligious?  Yeah. It was very irreligious, and I think my dad never spoke of God. I think he did not grow up in a religious household, and so I think a lot of times your belief is going to be dominated by your upbringing. In my dad’s case, that was very true. My mom, I always said—and I love my mom, and she’s a very genuine person, but a lot of her what I would call a religious belief was her political beliefs. And so very, very progressive politically, very much a humanist in terms of her philosophy. And a deity did not play a role in a lot of what she believed in, the principles that she wanted to pass down to myself. God was obsolete. He was unnecessary in what my mom truly felt was important. And so she was not dogmatic that there is no God. It simply was He was absent in all of the things that she gave to me. And I was really the one to say, “Hey, not only is Christianity irrelevant, but it’s actually harmful and detrimental to intellectual growth.” And I do want to investigate where that contemptuousness came from, but before we get there, even as you were growing up as a child, the Midwest is typically steeped in at least a cultural Christianity. Did you have any friends, even growing up, as a boy or a child, that professed belief? I would say that I did have friends that were Christians. I would say that they were very lukewarm and that they didn’t get their feelings hurt when I professed my atheism. The people that I targeted, and I did target them, were those outside of my friend group, and really the FCA kids, as I called them. They were not just Christians, they were the obnoxious Christians, and they were the ones I really wanted to humiliate. I wanted to minimize them. And so I did have friends that were Christians. I don’t think any of my close friends went to church. I think they were very much Pascal’s wager level Christians. “Hey, I believe in it for fire insurance, but it’s not really something I live out every single day.” So as you were growing up, and your mother obviously saw no need for God, and there was no God in your home, what informed your particular atheist identity … I mean belief that there is no God is a fairly strong positive statement of reality.  Yeah. How did you come to that place or that conclusion or that identity, I guess. How old were you when you decided that you believed in this way?  Yeah, no. That’s a great question. And so I would say my 8th grade year I watched a YouTube video. YouTube was just becoming a thing, and it was a Christopher Hitchens talk on a book that he was writing called God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I was completely mesmerized by what he was saying, and I thought, “Everything that I’ve kind of perceived, he’s putting it in words that make sense.” The next year would have been my freshman year of high school, 2007, and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion hits The New York Times bestselling list. And I went to Barnes & Noble in St. Louis, just a couple of hours away, and I bought my copy of The God Delusion. And that was my Bible. I memorized that book, and it was really my blueprint on how to deal with Christians, how to argue with Christians. And so I found, in a very Bible Belt community, I’m wearing politically motivated shirts, and the people that are the most distasteful to me are those that are carrying a King James Bible. And so it gave me an incentive to take my atheism a step further, to say, “Well, no, now I actually have motive to be angry at you people, because you’re the ones that oppose everything that I stand for.” And so it was the New Atheist Movement, the Dawkinses and the Dennetts and the Harrises and the Michael Shermers, and I still have all those books at my house. They’re in my garage, and I read them front to back. I read the Old Testament, and I memorized many parts of the Old Testament, the Levitical laws, the Deuteronomical laws. And it really became an opportunity for me to intellectually flex myself against those that I truly believed were just brainwashed. So you found an intellectual affinity with these New Atheists, and if you read their writings, which you obviously have, there is a bit of animosity spewing from the pages towards Christians, and I would imagine that, when you start there and then you add then the political aspects to it, I can see where the contemptuousness would rise.  Yeah. And I would say it reminds me of one of my favorite apologists, Frank Turek. When he debated Christopher Hitchens, of all people, he summarized Christopher’s atheism or antitheism as, “There is no God, and I hate him,” and that very much was my atheism. “God does not exist. He’s Santa Claus for adults, and, oh, by the way, He’s a misogynistic bully, and if you believe in him, you believe in a celestial dictator.” And so I very much went into the level of animosity that it was a war zone. When we talked about faith, when we talked about your testimony, I was going to treat you with the disdain that I thought you deserved. So you really embodied that the religion is bad and should be gotten rid of as quickly as possible, that poisonous view of Christianity and of Christians and that whole ideology.  Well, I would say often that some atheists say, “I don’t believe in God, but I wish God did exist. It sounds nice.” I took the stance of, “I don’t believe in God, and I’m glad He doesn’t exist.” And so when I say I was the community atheist, outside of Lebanon High School, we had a local message board that people would post on. The newspaper had it on their website. And I was one of the only ones that used my name. I used Roger Sherrer because I wanted everybody to know, “Hey, I’m not hiding behind a name.” And most of my posts had to do with Christianity and why it needed to be lessened in our community. So people that knew my name, they knew me as, “Oh, that’s the atheist kid from Lebanon High School.” And so it was not a secret. Right. So if God did not exist, and Christianity was not true, what was Christianity in your mind?  As Stephen Hawking said, it was for those that are afraid of the dark. It is for those that cannot explain death. It is the biggest phobia, the biggest fear that humans, we innately have. And yet, just as Mark Twain said, “You were dead 1000 years before you were born, it will be the same after you die.” You will cease to exist. And it is for people that need to play fairy tale to give them answers, just as we give children answers about the man that goes down the chimney or the bunny that does this or the tooth fairy. It is simply a more adult version of what we have been making up for centuries upon centuries. That was my answer. And just as at some point you have to tell children, “Hey, Guys, Santa’s not real,” it was my intellectual responsibility to play that role for adults and say, “Hey, Guys, the jig is up. It’s time to start living a different direction.” What convinced you that atheism and/or naturalism or materialism or the worldview that came along with atheism was true?  Yeah. It’s funny, because when I was in high school, I was captain of the debate squad. Speech and debate was my thing. It was the only thing I was really, really good at. So, in the midst of that identity of me trying to be this confident, vehement, dogmatic atheist that is just so good at speaking to all these Christians, deep down was the most insecure person you would have ever met, that was screaming, “Love me! I want somebody to love me. I want somebody to hold me and to say, ‘Hey, it’s going to be okay.’” And so my compromising in life of my war against Christianity came down so much to the biggest things that I feared. And so in the midst of that was my diagnosis with depression and the sadness and the despair that I had, and really, I would say, a nihilistic philosophy, in that there is no meaning, there is no value, there is no purpose. And it was Halloween night 2009, October 31, that I wrote out my suicide note. And it was a two-page note. It’s actually a note that I read to our congregation a few months ago for a sermon that we did on mental health, and I read the suicide note from beginning to end, where I apologized to my mom, to my dad, to my grandparents, to my principal and said, “I’m so sorry that I’ve been this burden on you,” because I had never felt any semblance of meaning for me to even exist anymore. And it was in that midst of breaking myself down to the point where there was nowhere to look other than up because I was on my back. And it was the next morning I found myself at the First Baptist Church. And funnily enough, the church that I’m sitting in, the church I’m now a pastor at, was the church that I found myself at, in the corner of the balcony, trying to hide from everybody to get some type of answer. And during the invitation, the pastor said, “If you lack meaning, value, or purpose in your life, there is a God that wants to know you,” and it was a Saul-to-Paul-level conversion in that moment, that I truly had become born again. Wow. Okay. There’s a lot there.  A lot there. Yeah. I wanted to give you everything, and then you could unpack it. Okay. So first of all, I want to acknowledge here that you were an honest enough atheist to understand the implications or consequences of your own worldview, which the endpoint is nihilism. For those who don’t understand that term, can you just express what nihilism is?  Sure. Yeah. It really is that… the aspect of what is the meaning of life? And that is a question that, if you look up Google searches, everybody wants to know. What is my meaning? And to me, I would tell people, I would say, “Listen, this is doom and gloom, but this is what you need to hear. We are on this rock, this pale blue dot, for a little bit of time. We will die. We will cease to exist. We will eventually decompose. And our meaning is whatever we put into it. But beyond that, our meaning is relative. It’s subjective. And in the end, we’re going to explode. We’re all going to die a heat death on this Earth. And our meaning, therefore, is by definition, purposeless, meaningless, and valueless. All of those things are man-made inventions that we put upon ourselves. We impose on ourselves to, again, give us some level of optimism when we wake up the next day. But in the end, there is truly no purpose in what we do. We are simply one species evolved from those that are in the animal kingdom. We are a half chromosome away from a chimpanzee. And in the end, we all die the same death, which leaves us with very little.” And so that was my style of nihilism. And usually people left saying, “That’s really depressing.” But I said, “Yeah, but the truth isn’t always depressing, right? I mean, when we see children get cancer, it’s easy to make up fairy tales and to make up heaven, and that sounds really good, but in the end, they’re dead, and they’re going in the ground with you and I, and that’s the end of it.” And so I think I almost wanted it to sound that depressing, because to me, life was depressing. And I wanted my philosophy in life to mirror everything else I saw. That was the lens that I viewed everything, was truly value is simply a man-made principle that truly doesn’t exist. So that’s a very honest, pragmatic, sober-minded view of life. Just because you lived this, and I’m so curious, again, as someone coming from another perspective now. But looking back, there are a lot of issues within atheism that are difficult to grapple with, nihilism, meaninglessness being one of them. But there are other questions that are very difficult to answer, I think, within the atheistic and naturalistic worldview, and I won’t name them for you. I want to see if there were any conundrums within the atheistic worldview that you scratched your head and said, “I’m not really sure about that. I don’t know how to answer that. I’m not sure if science will actually provide the answers that we need.” You had mentioned earlier that you were a very strong antitheist, and oftentimes with strong antitheism comes a strong confidence that your worldview is true, and for all of these reasons. But I wondered if there were any inherent doubts for you, as you, at the same time, were projecting this strength of persona of atheism.  Yeah. I think the first true intellectual objection that I had to really look myself in the mirror was a few months before I became a Christian. I was still very much involved in my atheism, and a local pastor that had heard of me had invited me to have a meeting with him. And I very much agreed, because I loved nothing more than to have one-on-one conversations with pastors. And   so I met with him, and we talked a lot about some of the issues we’ve already discussed, and one of those was dealing with death and how you deal with people that are involved in that, whether it be the death of a loved one. And he said, “Roger, I want you to put yourself in my shoes for a second. I want you to pretend that you’re a pastor and that you’re in my shoes.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “I want to tell you a true story that happened a few weeks ago.” And he said, “I had a couple here, mother and father, loving couple, devout Christians. The mother had a baby that was stillborn. The baby did not make it. They had named this baby. They had painted the walls of this baby’s room. They had picked out all the outfits for this child. And as a pastor, I’m driving to the hospital, and I’m thinking of the words that I have to say to this mother and to this father that are holding their baby.” And he said, “Thankfully, we were able to turn it into a moment of celebration, in that you’re going to see that child again. You will be with your child in eternity.” He said, “Roger, I want you to play the role of me right now. How would you have responded with your worldview to that family?” And I think in that moment, it took the issue off of me because it was easy for me to say, “Well, hey, life is meaningless. I’m only here for a little bit. I’m going to have as much fun as I can.” But in the first moment in my life, my feet were held to the fire on how do you respond to grief? How do you respond to suffering as an atheist? Because it was easy for me to put the telescope on God and say, “Well, why would God allow this?” But then instead to turn that telescope back on me and say, “Okay, if you can’t explain God’s account for suffering, how do you explain that account apart from God? How are you able to give that answer?” And I think that question wrestled with me for months and months and months, and it kept me up at night. And even now, as a pastor, and I get to talk to atheists that maybe have a similar question, and I get to use that example that worked in my life. And so that was something that—obviously it’s an emotional ploy, but there is an intellectual side of how do we have an account for that suffering if nihilism truly is put into practice? And I think that that was something that really was effective in my testimony. That’s very interesting and actually insightful, in terms of him asking you to consider something from your own worldview. Were there any other issues? Obviously, you are a thinker, you are a debater, and you knew the issues coming from the atheistic perspective. Were there any that you just scratched your head, like, “I’m not sure why there’s something rather than nothing?” Or, “How did the universe arise out of nothing?” Or the fine tuning of the universe? Or consciousness?  Sure. Yeah, well, my thesis is on the second premise of the Kalam cosmological argument, and so I’m looking at William Lane Craig’s work in the last ten years, specifically from 2006 until today, with the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, and basically, as we see the expansion of the universe and we’re starting to see more and more through the Hubble telescope, and less than 100 years ago, in the late 1920s, and so I have a passion for the origins and the beginning of the universe. But what’s interesting is that was never an issue, I think, that I really grappled with when I was an atheist. I think the best argument, in terms of an intellectual argument, which again was innately emotional, was probably what CS. Lewis grappled with in Mere Christianity. It’s funny because I talk about politics, and my mom was dominated by politics, and I was dominated by, I would say, my mom’s politics. And of course, going door to door, missing school in 2007, because I was going door to door, telling people to vote for the president that I wanted to vote for. That was very much my view, is, “Okay, let’s get God out of the way, and let’s focus on real world issues.” And I had a friend. His name is Tim. He’s a pastor here in Lebanon. But he was my one Christian friend that did go to church, and he did live out his faith. And I remember he would ask me, he said, “Roger, why do you hate Christians so much?” And I focused on homophobia. I focused on women who don’t have the rights that they should because of Christianity. And I remember Tim saying, “Well, Roger, why is that wrong? Why is it wrong? Let’s say Christians are homophobic, hypothetically. Why is that wrong?” And I would say, “Well, that’s wrong because it’s humanity,” and blah, blah, blah. And eventually he got me to eventually run into my nihilism, in that I’m so angry about all of these issues. And then finally, “Roger, what standard are you using to say that Christians are immoral for these actions that they take?” And I think finally figuring out, “Well, wait a second, I think certain things are objectively evil and some things are objectively good. Well, wait a second, I can’t do that. I have to argue moral relativism. There’s no other way out of that.” And so then, finding myself looking at the arguments for moral relativism and subjective morality, but then finding out that, yeah, that doesn’t do it for me, because if moral relativism is true the way I need it to be true, it has to be a prerequisite. Well, then I don’t get to have the moral outrage that I truly feel when it comes to why certain Christians do this and why self righteousness exists and why judgmental people exist. And so I think it really was objective moral values and duties. If they exist, what standard do I have? And eventually I realized, “Well, some of this is self evident. There are objective moral values.” And that one was tough for me, too, as an atheist, I would say. But I guess, too, I want to appreciate the fact that as a sober-minded thinker, a debater, someone who was willing to weigh the ideas for what they were, you were willing to admit that objective moral values and duties don’t fit within the box of naturalism. That they are not consistent with your worldview. Again, for those who might be listening and are a little bit confused by that, I guess maybe you can speak to the fact that atheists have a sense of right and wrong, right? And can be very moral people.  Yeah. But their ability to ground that sense of right and wrong is- Exactly. Yeah. And I tell people all the time, jokingly, I know a lot of atheists that are a lot better on the surface than some of the Christians that I’ve met and talked to. And as Paul writes in Romans, he says, “The law was written on their hearts.” It’s not that you have to read the Bible. When Moses had the Ten Commandments, I’m assuming they knew, “Thou shalt not kill,” before he revealed the Ten Commandments. And so it’s not just the knowledge, but it is where is that seed? Okay, I’ve never been taught that killing children recreationally is evil. What makes that self evident? And so we all have that self evidence, no matter what our philosophical or ideological belief is. The question then becomes what is the seed? What is what is written on our hearts, as Paul says in the book of Romans. And so certainly, yeah, that is definitely something that I think a lot of atheists will straw man and say, “Well, no. I’m a good person. I do a lot of good.” And that’s not the argument. So yeah. So it sounds like, in your journey, that you were having not only some intellectual doubts, some dissonance perhaps, with regard to your own worldview intellectually, but also existentially, that you were depressed because of the purposelessness and the meaninglessness of life, I mean to the point where you were willing to write a suicidal note. And obviously, thankfully, that did not come to fruition. But you mentioned in your story that you found yourself in a church. And so I’m curious. Were you invited? Was it because of your felt need that perhaps there’s something more? Or maybe I need to give this a second look. I mean, the thought of such a strong antitheist sitting in a worship service in a church? I guess I’m just wanting to know how you got from A to Z here.  Yeah, no. And so it’s funny because, my junior year, I took an art class with a lady by the name of Shelley Osborne. Shelley Osborne was who I would call obnoxiously Christian. She was not enough to say, “I believe in God,” but she had to wear the cross around her neck, and she was obnoxious. And I did not like her, and I didn’t even know her, but I didn’t like her. And my friends knew, you’re going to take an art class with the obnoxious Christian. You’re the obnoxious atheist, and so my friends literally took that class with me as spectators, because they knew that I was going to challenge her. And I think it was like the third week, and she starts talking about art history, and she’s showing Christian art, she’s showing these different levels of Christian art. And I immediately raise my hand, and I start asking her, “Mrs. Osborne, is it true you believe that a man survived in a giant fish for three days? Because if you believe that, I’ve got some ocean front property for you that I’d like to sell you. You believe in the talking serpent. You believe in all of this. You believe in the story of Noah on the boat,” and I mean, just humiliating her in class in front of all these students. My friends, they’re in the corner, and they’re like, “This is perfect. This is fun.” And I remember Mrs. Osborne, she said, “Roger, I can’t give you my testimony in a public school class,” and she moved on. But it was afterwards she came up to me, and she said, “Roger, if you really have questions about my faith, I’m going to do something out of the ordinary. I’m going to invite you to have a meeting with my pastor, and you are allowed to ask him any question you want to.” And so again, my rule, if a pastor invited me, I accepted. And so the next day, she took me to her church, which happens to be the church that I’m sitting in. And I met Matt Taylor, who happens to now be my boss and my lead pastor. And I met Matt Taylor, and we had a two-hour dialogue where I asked him all of my gotcha questions. Those are my checkmate questions that I knew no Christian could answer. And the conversation was very uneventful, because I don’t remember much of the content of what we talked about. Neither of our minds were changed, but I remember afterwards, as I got up to leave, he came up, and he hugged me, and he said, “Hey, you want to do lunch tomorrow?” And it was the first time in my life where a Christian, after I had just spent two hours decimating his worldview and telling him why he was basically an intellectual idiot, he had embraced me and said, “Hey, let’s hang out. Let’s do some stuff,” and so what began was the most unlikely friendship in the history of Lebanon, Missouri, the most well-known lead pastor and the most well-known atheist. And Matt Taylor became my best friend in the entire world. He became the person that I called. We never talked religion beyond debate, and I never asked for prayer. But when I needed someone to listen to me, Matt was the person I called, apart from being a pastor or a minister. And so I tell people all the time, 1 Peter 3:15 is kind of the apologetics verse. “Be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks it of the hope that is in you, but do so with gentleness and respect.” And if we don’t do it with gentleness and respect, having an answer will so often fall on deaf ears, because no atheist has ever converted to Christ because they lost a debate. I’ve never met an atheist that said, “Okay, your points are better than my points. You win. I’ll be a Christian.” There’s obviously much more to that. It is how we present ourselves. And so the next morning, I write my suicide note, I call the suicide hotline, I pass out on my bed, and I wake up the next morning as alone and defeated as I had ever felt. And I remember saying, “I need to be around the one person who has loved me throughout all of this, and his name happens to be Matt Taylor.” And so I went to the First Baptist Church not to be a Christian, but because I felt that that’s where I needed to be, because that’s where Matt was. That’s extraordinary! So from the initial meeting, and he said, “Let’s do lunch.” I just am curious what that looked like. You met for lunch. You said you didn’t debate. Was it just getting to know you like a friend and hanging out? What did that look like? And for how long did that last?  Yeah. It’s funny, in the few months of my atheism, he taught me how to drive a stick shift. And so I was 17, and I didn’t have my driver’s license because my parents had never taken me out to drive. I had failed the driver’s test. And Matt said, “Hey, meet me at the church at 11:00.” And so he taught me how to drive a stick shift. And then I went and got my driver’s license. And he’s a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan. I’m a big Atlanta Falcon fan. So we would talk football, and we would argue why the Falcons are better than the Steelers. And he was a right wing conservative, and he would say that from the pulpit. I was a far left liberal. And so we would argue politics, and we would have fun with it. And he truly got to know me in a span of a few months, more so than probably any friend I had ever had. Wow. So he really just invested in you just because he loved you as a friend.  Yeah. And I was so used to Christians saying, “Hey, I’ll pray for you,” and I never heard from them again. And my response to that was always, “You pray for me, and I’ll think for you,” because it was so condescending, and it was so much…. Christians were so focused on the afterlife that they were missing what was happening in that moment, and all it would have taken was ten minutes to realize, “There’s something else with this kid. There’s something going on here,” and they were so focused on my eternity, which is important. As a pastor, I’m very much into that. I think we need to be into that, but we have to minister to people where they’re at. And Matt ministered to where I was at, and he did it with gentleness and respect, and it opened my heart. Through all those months together, did he ever bring up kind of God-focused conversations, or did he just let you become open to go wherever you felt comfortable?  Yeah, no. We did. And it got to the point where he broke those walls down, where he could give me his testimony, and he can tell me about the impossible things that God had done in his life, and instead of me getting into debate mode, I think I was willing to listen to them. Now, granted, my response typically was, “Hey, Matt. That’s great. I appreciate that you believe that,” but I think it humanized it to an extent where it wasn’t just a sales pitch. I always said Christians are like timeshare people. “Hey, I’ve got a place that you can stay for the weekend, but you have to listen to my presentation,” and so many Christians maybe wanted to be my friend, and then I realized, “Oh, wait a second, this is a timeshare. You just want me to listen to your sales pitch. Okay, well, no, I’m out, because I thought you actually wanted to be with me. It turns out you just wanted to make your little sales pitch.” Matt ceased that in my life. He was a Christian that it wasn’t just a timeshare presentation, but he was able to make it real in a way that I had actually never seen before, and so he taught me a lot without necessarily beating me over the head with a Bible. That’s really beautiful. But through your relationship, you were still, I guess, going downhill emotionally in your own life, really despairing, I guess, and to the point where you were willing, I guess of your own volition, to go to church. That I’m sure, in your mind, must have been a real point of desperation. But yet having been softened, I suppose, by having been with Matt and seeing the love and care that he showed- Yeah, absolutely. So tell me again a little bit more about what happened that morning.  Yeah. It was funny because I did not want people to know I was there. I did not want people because my fear was that, everyone jokes about, “Well, if I walk into church, the steeple is going to burn down,” or something like that. Being a local celebrity and that my atheism was my identity, and I’m now going to the biggest Southern Baptist church in Lebanon, Missouri. I joked that it was like I became a Navy Seal. I became a special operations Tom Clancy splinter cell. Like, I snuck into that church and got to the balcony. And in our church, we have a lower level, and then we have an upper level. And I was able to get unscathed to the top left corner of the balcony, and I was able to sit by myself, away from everybody. Matt didn’t know I was there. I had to call Matt the next day, and say, “Hey, buddy. We need to have a conversation because there’s something I need to tell you.” But I was able to get into church and leave church basically unnoticed. And what’s really cool about that as a pastor—I preach a handful of times a year on Sundays. And every time I will preach, I end it with an invitation. And that invitation is the top left corner of that balcony. And I get to point to the very balcony that I got to sneak into and the balcony that I became born again in, now preaching to 1000 people on a Sunday and saying, “Hey, maybe you’re in that balcony right now. Maybe that’s where you’re at.” And so it’s like we talk about how God writes these stories in our life. And it’s like, man, God wrote this out perfectly. Twelve years later, I still get to do that. And it was last month was my spiritual birthday, November 1, 2009. And every year, that’s the most important day of my life. And it’s a day of reflection and just a day of thanks, that God, you’ve put me in this position, like I don’t deserve this. And yet that’s how He works. And so it’s been really, really cool. So what did you hear that morning that changed your mind and heart? Did you anticipate going in…. You went in stealth, and you weren’t probably sure why you were there. But then… So it was probably an approach avoidance in a way, but then you found yourself on the other side of the fence.  Yeah. And I think my goal was truly not to get a gospel conversation or a presentation. I think my goal was to show up, hide, and then eventually, once the message was over, I was going to kind of sneak down to Matt and say, “Hey, buddy. Can we maybe go do lunch or something?” And so my goal was kind of to get to Matt. And I knew church is where he’s at. It’s easy to find a pastor on a Sunday morning. You don’t have to go searching for him. And the message itself, the content of the message, is not what really drew me in, but in that invitation, and I say that it was word for word. “If you lack value, meaning, or purpose, there is a God above that wants to know you,” and as Christians, we always joke like, “Man, Pastor, Preacher, that message really spoke to me this morning. I felt like you were preaching to me one on one.” That’s never been more literal in that moment. Because he inadvertently—it wasn’t like he knew I was there. He used the very lingo of how I saw life. I mean, meaning, value and purpose, that’s what he said. And I tell people, and they think I’m being hyperbolic or figurative, I almost collapsed in my chair. And it really was a moment that—I say Saul to Paul. And it was a moment where I walked out of the church. I tell people I could have crab walked all the way to Pittsburgh. I was so happy. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t explain everything, but I knew I was born again. And so my whole life flashing in a moment, and I knew, “This is why I’m here, and this is my story.” So the words “born again,” especially for those who are perhaps skeptics, skeptical,  of that kind of Christian language, that may seem a little bit off putting. What do you mean by born again?  Yeah. No, I mean, and Paul talks about a new body, and we say born again, and it does become, and as a pastor, I’m always careful, because sometimes we get into that church lingo. But in that moment, realizing the gift of grace and realizing that I had spent my entire life sitting on God’s lap, just so I could slap Him in the face, and knowing that, for some people, it’s the struggle of, am I truly forgiven? And I think in that moment, as I was accepting Jesus, I was like, “God, do You really love me? Do You really understand all the things that I have done?” Because I had been living for the flesh, and yet in that moment—and when I say flesh, my meaning and purpose in life was what is happening right now? Because in the end, it’s all going to end. But to truly realize that there’s something beyond myself, and I think when I talk to my students, and I hear students present Jesus to people, and I say it’s very important. And as a former atheist, I would give this advice to any Christian: Do not present Jesus as a self-help coach. Do not present Jesus as Somebody who is going to fix all of your problems, because if that’s the case, there’s going to be a lot of former atheists that feel like they’ve been sold a bill of goods. One of my favorite authors, J. Warner Wallace, he says, in Cold Case Christianity, he says, “I did not become a Christian because it works for me. I did not become a Christian because it makes life better. I became a Christian because Christianity is true, and it became real to me.” And so in that moment, making something that was once artificial, something that was once flat-out fake, in how I viewed it, it became real. It became authentic. And in that moment, I realized, “I’m leaving this a new creation. I am leaving this as a brand new person.” I’m still Roger, I still have the same struggles. And by the way, 29 years old, I still suffer from clinical depression. And that’s my testimony. God did not cure my depression. He did not remove a lot of the anguish that I had in life, but He gave me an opportunity to live with that and to live through that through His Son Jesus. And so I know that’s very churchy and it sounds very churchy, but I think even to the most hard atheist, he can hear that and say, “No. That’s not disingenuous. It may be a fairy tale, but it’s not disingenuous.” And I think that that’s important. It’s important to be real with people, because atheists need real. They need authenticity. And I think, as Christians, we need to thrive on that. Yeah. And and I agree with you. There was something so profoundly real and true for you in that moment that allowed you to surrender, as it were, surrender this animosity, surrender everything that you had. Like you said, you were sitting on God’s lap to slap Him in the face. I can hear a skeptic in my mind saying, “Sometimes stories are too good to be true, and that’s what you wanted. You wanted this kind of meaning. You wanted purpose and value and dignity. And although you were sober-minded to accept it as an atheist, you no longer are, so you bought into this.” What about that? Of course, there’s been a huge transformation, but what about that morning that convinced you that it was true?  Sure, yeah. Now, J. Warner Wallace, I agree, and I believe that you believe that, too, that you believe Christianity not because it works, but because it’s true. Same as C.S. Lewis, right? But what convinced you? Of course, God is involved in all of this, and sometimes changing your mind or your heart is mysterious, and it’s a work of the Spirit of God. And at that moment, I’m sure it was much more profound than some kind of intellectual argument.  Exactly. But at the end of the day, the skeptical rebuttal. How would you respond to that?  Yeah. Well, there has to be both, and so one could say, “Well, Roger, you contradicted yourself, because before you said no atheist has ever become a Christian because they lost a debate, but yet J. Warner Wallace says, ‘I became a Christian because Christianity is true,’ so how do those…?” And there has to be both. I appreciate Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, who say that there is something beyond myself, and even though we can get into the intellectual side, William Lane Craig, one of my favorite apologists, and of course I’m doing my thesis work on a lot of what he writes, but when he debates, he gives the intellectual arguments, the teleological argument, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the ontological argument, all these big words that people are like, “Okay, great.” But he always ends every debate. He says the final argument is not much of an argument at all, but it’s what philosophers call a properly basic argument, which is that God can be personally experienced, He can be known apart from arguments. And so, as Christians, we believe in the Holy Spirit, and that’s not just church speak, right? I mean, that’s not just, “Oh, all of these things,” and some Christians don’t even know what they mean, but we literally believe, we literally believe that, when you become a Christian, that the Holy Spirit will come inside you. And we believe that as a born again Christian, you live with the Holy Spirit inside of you. That in itself—there has to be a level of self evidence to say, “Listen, I have personally experienced this.” Now, if you want to argue that and it’s like, “Well, that’s your experience versus my experience,” well, then that’s when we’re able to have an apologetical conversation and say, “Okay, that’s my experience. That’s our foundation, our pillars, our bedrock. We have that. Now let’s build arguments on top of that that will confirm or validate the emotional experience to make it intellectual.” And so from there, okay, there’s my testimony. Now let’s talk about the beginning of the universe. Now let’s talk about moral values and duties. Okay, let’s talk about the complexity of the human eye and let’s go from there. But I think there you’re able to bridge two conversations into one. And I think that that is very effective when dealing with atheists that are often going to have two different levels of questions, the emotional question and the intellectual question. Right. And your story is such a beautiful marriage of the both.  Like I said, it is God’s authorship in my life. And we talk about divine providence and all of that, and it has been a blessing to be able to share that testimony and to be able to baptize students every month that are very much in that position and to be able to say, “Hey, listen. God is using me as a vessel, and there’s days I wonder, ‘Am I qualified? Is this really…’” like, of all the people, my background, my testimony, and yet it’s just a confirmation every single day I’m exactly where God needs me. Yeah. It really is beautiful, really, to listen to. And I imagine that people around you who have seen the transformation are just amazed that you no longer have to enter the church building like a Navy Seal.  No, I walk through the front door now. You’re on the front lines now.  Yeah. Exactly. It’s amazing. Right. So for those skeptics—and I love that you work with young people, because I’m sure you’re hearing all kinds of push back, so you’re on the front lines, just like I said. And so for those who are skeptics and who are listening in and are pushing back but yet open in some odd way, could you speak to them? What would you encourage them to do in dealing with this whole issue of God?  Yeah. And I think it’s a great question, and I think if I have a student or even an adult that is grasping with that, or let’s say they’re not even grasping with it, they’ve made up their mind, and they say, “Hey, listen. God does not play a role,” I very much focus on the emotional versus the intellectual, kind of what we had talked about, finding out what those objections are. I think what you will find is that, from a naturalistic worldview, that this is all we have, nature is all… the observable universe, that’s it. Going into the question of, “Okay, and that’s great, and science is an amazing tool that we have,” but beyond that, when we talk about things that we experience every day, and I love focusing on human consciousness and music and poetry. Goodness gracious, I’m a 29-year-old man. I cannot watch Titanic without crying. I’ve never gotten through it without crying. It’s embarrassing. I can’t watch America’s Got Talent without seeing an audition that just makes me feel like, “Yes! This is it!” And I don’t mean to trivialize it, and yet I think we all have to have a standard, and we all have to have an account for, “Okay, this is how I explain this,” and there are so many atheists that are great, great people, and they do things in life that I envy on the goodness scale. But why are we putting that standard? And going back to the pastor that I talked to years ago, and the mother holding the child, and the child has taken its last breath. What do you say? How do you respond? How do you do that with love and truth, but to give them hope? And I think that, for so many, and those that may be atheists, and they say, “Well, I can’t fit God into this this worldview that I have.” Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and don’t be afraid to go to Christians that have answers. Because here’s the thing: As Christians, we have a biblical account. We have 1 Peter 3:15, 2 Corinthians 10:5. Paul tells us we are to demolish arguments when we talk about the knowledge of God and that there are very real answers to very real questions. And if the only answers you’re getting are, “You’re going to hell,” or, “I’m going to pray for you,” find other answers, because there may be some other answers that may intellectually surprise you. Yeah. That’s good advice. And some of that, again, is for the Christian, too. I hear that asking good questions is a good thing. But when I think of your story and I think of, whether it’s the art teacher in your life or Matt, Pastor Matt, and the way that he invested in you, even the way that the art teacher knew she may not have had the answers that you were seeking, but she knew someone who did. And resources. How would you commend Christians to engage?  That’s so important. It’s so incredibly important. It reminds me of a conversation I had. It was my sophomore year science class, and I was talking to a Christian, well-meaning kid, good kid, and he asked me, he’s like, “Well, there’s no way you’re an atheist, and you believe in evolution, and yet why are there still monkeys? If evolution is true, then you evolved from a monkey, but there’s monkeys all around,” and it’s like, there’s an easy atheistic response to that. You actually don’t understand evolution. You’re not a biologist. Like, we did not evolve from monkeys. We evolved from apelike ancestors. Like, okay, I just destroyed what you felt was a checkmate response to me when, in all actuality, your response should have been, “Hey, listen, I believe in intelligent design. I believe in young earth creationism, or progressive creationism like Hugh Ross, whatever you believe in,” and instead of us always having the answer, instead saying, “Hey, listen. Let me recommend a book. Hugh Ross wrote a book. He’s got a ministry called Reasons to Believe. And all those objections you have, Hugh Ross, he’s an astrophysicist. He is so brilliantly smart. I would encourage you to go and watch one of his DVDs and then let’s talk about it. Let’s have coffee, and give me your response, because I would love to hear, as an atheist, like, how do you respond to some of those objections that he has?” And as a former atheist, I promise you, anytime somebody told me, “Watch this, and let’s talk about it,” I’ll always take him up on that. And sometimes, as Christians, that’s all we’ve got to do. We don’t have to be smart. We just have to know somebody who is smart. And through that, we’re able to have a lot of good conversations from it. That’s really, again, excellent advice. Anything else about your story that you think we missed that you’d like to add before we finish?  I will close with this: I wrote an article in a journal for our local apologetics network in the state of Missouri, and I implored parents and youth leaders. We are arming our children, our young adults. We are arming our students with rubber knives, and we are expecting them to go to gunfights when it comes to their faith. And “Jesus loves me, this I know,” is true if you’re a Christian, but the questions that are being asked as we continue into this world that we live in, a fallen world, a postmodern world, we have to understand that young people are leaving the faith in droves. And even with my apologetic background, I have conversations consistently with students that come home and say, “I’m done. I’m not doing it anymore. Because I was never given an answer. I was never given an account.” And thankfully, some of those students we can try and win back, and we can have those conversations. Do not take this issue lightly. Do not take this issue with a grain of salt. It is a very real issue, and it is something that, as Christians, we need to be ready to fight. And I don’t mean fight in a violent sense, but we need to be ready with our students and our young adults and our children. We need to arm them with the proper material, proper education, so that when they do go off to college, as Jesus says, to love the Lord your God with all your mind. We need to start teaching our students to love God with all their minds. And that would be my core thing that I always want to stress to parents. We’re in this together. Let’s do it. So that’s how I would end it. No, that’s fantastic. And I think that applies to ourselves as well. Right? So many of us are ill equipped to deal with what’s happening in culture, and the issues that are just like a tsunami that are coming at us. We all need to be prepared, right?  Very much so. You’ve brought that up many times through 1 Peter 3:15. And I so appreciate that. Roger, you are just such an inspiration in so many ways. You are a voice of wisdom, a voice of reason, obviously a voice of passion for what you do, that this is something so incredibly real for you that you’ve made it the front line of your life. And I so appreciate your story. Your testimony is powerful. I think it gives hope for people who know others in their life and think they will never believe. I mean, you were that guy.  Yeah. And now you’re this guy. I mean, look at you now, and I just think, “Praise God!” No one is too far from His reach, and His plans are perfect. So I am so grateful for you coming on to tell your story, and I’m excited for those who are listening. So thank you so much for coming on.  Oh, I appreciate that, Jana. Thank you for having me on, and thank you for all that you do and your ministry as well. And you certainly are fighting the good fight alongside, so we appreciate all that you do. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Roger’s story. You can find out more about Roger and the resources he recommended in this episode in the episode notes below. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website at, again, www.sidebstories.com. If you’re a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with Roger or a former atheist from this podcast with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. Again, I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social networks. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Through a serious study of philosophy, Dr. John Wise began to doubt his Christian beliefs.  After 25 years of atheism, he began to question his disbelief. John’s Resources: Podcast: ‘The Christian Atheist’: https://pod.link/1553077203 Podcast: No Compromise Podcast: Simple Gifts Website: https://wisewordsforyouroccasion.wordpress.com Resources recommended by Mark: Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories on our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page.  How do we know what is really real? Can we know that God exists? How do we know that what we believe about the world around us, much less what we believe about our own lives, is even true? We may not be able to hold to our beliefs with 100% certainty, but can we at least hold to a level of confidence that our beliefs are true? And how can we know? And what exactly is faith? Where does knowledge end and faith began? Is faith simply blind? Or is it grounded upon what we can know? Do only religious people have faith? Or is some kind of faith inevitable to anyone who does not know everything about everything?  These big questions about how we know things, religious or not, are important ones, especially for those who are deep thinkers, who are philosophically minded, who are intently searching for answers to the mysteries of knowledge and life. These kinds of questions can lead towards skepticism, towards deconstruction of faith and rejection of belief in God. But these questions can also be the ones that lead towards a faith and belief in God.  In today’s story, philosopher and former atheist Dr. John Wise once rejected his Christian beliefs for agnosticism and then full-blown atheism. After 25 years of disbelief, he rejected atheism through a journeying back to the reality and the truth of God. After all those years, what was so compelling to convince him to return? I hope you’ll come along to find out.  Welcome to Side B Stories podcast, John. It’s great to have you with me today.  I’m really glad to be here. Terrific. So tell me a little bit about your life right now, kind of in a nutshell, and then we’ll walk back into your story.  Perfect. Right now, I am teaching philosophy at the University of Arizona Global Campus, online. So I got my PhD from the University of California, Irvine, in 2004. while I’m teaching philosophy at University of Arizona Global Campus, my wife and I podcast together, and she does all the technical stuff. And we began a podcast called The Christian Atheist, telling my story of how I converted from 25 years as an atheist professor of philosophy back to Christ. And in that podcast, which we’ve been doing now for about two years, we do some pretty heavy philosophical lifting. And so Jenny and I do a sort of subsidiary podcast on the same channel called No Compromise, in which she and I talk together, and hopefully she’s able to soften some of my hard edges and make clear some of the deep and difficult things that I try to elucidate on The Christian Atheist. And we have one other podcast called Simple Gifts, in which I try to make the point that everything in the Western world points to God. I really, truly believe that there is no truth that does not point to God. And so therefore, I try, in that podcast—I never preach on it. All I do is read literature, poetry, whatever it is, and I invite everyone to come and listen. And hopefully, as C.S. Lewis said, all of the books, if you’re an atheist, will turn against you, and they will point you to God. Wow! It sounds like you’re very busy and that you have some incredibly substantive and intriguing things that you’re talking about. And we’ll put all of those links in the episode notes. Before you were 25 years an atheist, you were a Christian. So that gives me some indication that you grew up in a home where Christianity was present. Why don’t you take us back to your boyhood, your childhood? Talk to us about your family, your community. My mother was definitely an evangelical Christian. She had Christian radio on 24/7, and so I grew up hearing people like Charles Stanley and Charles Swindoll, Through the Bible, all of those things I grew up with. And I made a decision for Christ myself when I was five or six. It was very real to me and kept me going all through my early adulthood. But my father was—I guess I would classify my father as an agnostic. A very brilliant man. He fought in World War II. He was at Pearl Harbor when it was hit. I lost him in ‘95. But I loved my father deeply. He loved my mother deeply. And I used to tell people when I was growing up that I got my faith from my mother and my ethics from my father. So I grew up in a traditional home, in the sense that we embraced all the traditional values that would have shaped the Western world. And my father was a big believer in discussions, and so every night when we would come home and share dinner together, we would discuss topics ranging the entire, from politics to literature. So we discussed everything, and I guess that laid the foundation for me to become deeply interested in philosophy later in life. So, yeah, my home was, in that sense, a divided home, between the Christianity of my mother and the agnosticism of my father. Was that challenging for you as a young child growing up? You had an expressed belief in God, but did you ever question Christianity growing up in a home where your father was not a believer? Did he attend church with you all or any of that?  Yes, we did. We went to a mainline denomination church, United Church of Christ. My mother thought it was important for us to go to church as a family, and my father would go to that church, whereas he wouldn’t have gone to a more conservative one. But I don’t think I felt it ever as a super deep tension. I guess that might be a result of the psychology of children. It was what I knew, and it was a nice mix, actually, because my father and my mother were both very open people in terms of intellect. They were interested in everything. And so, although my father, I think, was an agnostic, I wouldn’t say he was exactly hostile to faith. He never certainly gave me any difficulties about my growing up with faith and was very open to talk about things like that. So I don’t think it was a hostile environment, but it certainly left things open for me, I think, for later, for sure. Yeah, I would imagine so. But it’s good at least there was some sense of consensus, going to church together, and a sense of, I guess, community in that way, that that hostility wasn’t there. So you grew up with a very evangelical mother, a mainline church, and an agnostic father. That’s quite a mix.  That is a mix. But evidently you maintained your faith through childhood, through adolescence. How long did you hang on to this expressed belief in Christ and Christianity?  Up through high school graduation, and then I went to four years of Bible college. Okay, so this was pretty solid belief for you.  Oh, yeah. I was planning on being a pastor. Okay.  And so I spent four years in Bible college, became interested in philosophy in the midst of that, and studied it with one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met in my entire life. Bob Willey. If you’re out there, Bob, still today, I adore you. You’re a fantastic man. You taught me a lot, and I hope I wasn’t a disappointment in walking away from God. So he was amazing. But Bible college was a double-edged sword for me, because when I got there, I was used to my family’s sort of freewheeling notions, and Bible college presented me with a community of faith that was much more rigid in its understanding of things than I think I was ready to deal with. And it became overwhelming for me. And what I tend to tell people is that that community of faith gave me a vision of Christianity that I tried to live up to, and it felt utterly impossible to live up to. And so I began to question its validity, and by the time I graduated from Bible college, I was probably well on my way to agnosticism, maybe already there. And it wasn’t until graduate school that I actually pulled the plug, but I was certainly deeply questioning by the end of my Bible college career. So when you say you were deeply questioning, obviously you mentioned that it was a hard standard to live up to. And of course, the biblical standard is quite high. It’s perfection. Hard to reach that. But I know that there are certain expressions of Christianity that really promote that kind of works-oriented, earn your way kind of acceptance with God, and that can be very daunting. But when you say questioning, especially as you were studying philosophy, and probably that was opening up some intellectual doors and questions about another aspect, probably the truth or the validity of the belief, much less living up to it. Were there both kinds of pushing back against the Christian faith by the time you left? How would you describe it?  It wasn’t a sense of trying to live up to the perfection of God and failing to do that. I was okay with that. I’m still okay with that today, fortunately, because that’s a higher standard than I’ll ever reach. And trust me, I’m not a good man. I don’t think of myself as a good man. And there’s plenty of evidence that I’m not. That I’m a Christian now, it really isn’t a reflection on my Bible college days on that score. What it was was a sense in which I was doing a lot of evangelistic work while I was in Bible college, and I began to think to myself, “Am I selling the right product here? There seems to be holes in this,” and the more I thought about it, the less certain I was that it was the right answer to the questions that were being asked by the world. Science seemed to have more certainty than I could find in Christianity. And I think when I say I couldn’t live up to it, I think I mean more that the Christian message, the Christian story that I was being given, seemed to have holes that I couldn’t plug up. And because I couldn’t plug them up, I began to think what Christianity was for me was an attempt to convince myself of the truth of these things. And I think what set me free ultimately to come back was the recognition—and we’re anticipating things here, but—was the recognition that all of those doubts don’t need to be answered and that you’ll never get to certainty. And that’s why we call it faith. And that was, I think, the huge lesson that I needed to learn. And it took me 25 years to get there. As you were experiencing the doubts, and you’re deciding, “There are too many holes. I can’t seem to fill the holes or find the answers, ” Was it just a gradual deterioration or a disintegration of your faith or belief? Was it a sudden kind of process? And were you going through this alone? Were you asking, say, your philosophy professor? Were you asking the questions, or to a science professor or anyone to help you fill up those holes?  The process of education for me… I’m deeply introverted. I don’t know if you know some of the psychological tests that evaluate your personality. On introversion, I am like all the way down. I am such a deep introvert that I almost can’t get out of it. I’m close to being zero in extroversion. So I lived inside my head, and so helping other people, okay, I would maybe talk to other people a little bit, but not much. Almost everything was done inside my head. I always tell people that I learned in spite of school, never because of school. So school might help me, point me to a direction that I could explore myself, but I lived in books, and I lived in my mind. And so I searched to try to find the answers, to plug them up for myself, and this was probably very arrogant, because I didn’t really trust anybody else to answer those questions. Certainly the questions that I asked of the evangelical leaders, the answers I got and still get to this day when I ask those same questions, don’t… I get this dogma instead of serious thought about what it is you’re asking. And they return to these pat answers. And I’ve learned that pat answers are almost always wrong at some level. And for me, getting to the point of being able to allow those extra strings to fly off and recognizing that those extra strings are never going to be tied up because I am, as Socrates says, a human who has fundamental limitations, and the only Person who knows everything is the Person that I stopped believing in, God. And so any human being is fundamentally ignorant. It’s unavoidable, and it’s okay to be there. So this was, in a sense, an epistemological… I wouldn’t call it a crisis of sorts, but almost an awakening of your own, like you say, our own human, what they call a finitude or limitations. You’re telling me, “No, we can’t find certainty, but it’s not so lost that we can’t know anything,” right? So in a way, you’re pushing away from God because of a lack of knowledge, of being able to know for certain that God exists because of some holes that were coming. So I guess my question is: Did you move from your lack of confidence in the absolute certainty of knowledge to not a total run to relativism or postmodernism? I presume that you landed somewhere in between?  I don’t look at faith as a leap in the dark. I think of it as stepping out on what you have found to work most plausibly and moving forward with it, being willing to say, “I don’t know, but this seems to be the best way forward,” and then moving forward with that. So that’s rational. I think getting to that point and every step along the way is rational. But there comes a point where you’re at a fork in the road, and you’ve got to choose. In fact, I was just reading just today, because I knew I was coming on with you, and C.S. Lewis talks, in Surprised by Joy, about the moment of his conversion, and he says something there that I found absolutely profound. It’s about a paragraph long, but he thinks that that perhaps was the one really free choice in his life. He stood there, and there were no requirements to go one way or the other, but he knew that choosing at that moment was the most momentous choice you could make. And that’s exactly what it was like for me when I came back to Christ, because I told people, Christians who had talked to me, that I would never come back because I’d thrown the switch, and I didn’t know how to come back. And yet there was a moment where—and it came with my relationship with Jenny—where that switch opened up again, and I was standing there and it was, in a way, dispassionate, and it felt like a moment of freedom. Like you choose one way or the other and everything hangs on the choice, but you’ve got no… I hate to say you don’t have any rational reason, but in a sense you don’t. It’s like the rationality comes from the choice, rather than the other way around, and you’re stuck with a value choice instead of a rational choice, because both sides have a rational story that’s compelling. And this time I had a reason to choose Christ. As you were leaving the whole idea of Christianity behind, and you said that you were an atheist for 25 years. You taught philosophy as an atheist philosopher, which means, of course, that you embraced a different worldview, a non-theistic, non-God, non-supernatural worldview, which, as a thinker, a deep thinker that you are, it makes me wonder how much you embraced the naturalistic worldview, took that on in terms of even your own rationality. You speak of Lewis and how, in the naturalistic worldview, it’s hard to have grounds for trusting your own rationality, even to make rational choices. So I’m wondering, as an atheist, how much did you consider these implications and these losses that you had in the Christian worldview that you no longer had at your access?  That is a fantastic question, and it is something that I look back on now and see the blindnesses that you live in once you accept that worldview. There are very few real atheists, because being an atheist means you abandon completely the sense of any transcendent truth or value. And you can’t live like that as a human being. You just can’t. Because living as a human being means that you’re valuing things at a level beyond simply being able to explain it away. And so you’re right, my position was undermining itself. And that’s why I think ultimately I came back. And by the time by the time I actually made my conversion back, I was wanting desperately to come back but found no way, because I saw how empty it had all become. And also, I guess, one of the things that helped keep me tied in is that I knew the Christian worldview as well as any Christian did. I rejected it. And yet I had deep respect and love for Christians and for Christ. And one of the verses that kept haunting me—was Hebrews 11:6: “He who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” Now, I had no problem with the second part of that verse, all through my atheism. It’s like, “If there’s a God, He’s a good God, and He rewards those who seek Him.” And I found that to be true throughout my life. Whenever I was looking for things, it seemed as though things came together to help me find the truth. And so that was the easy part for me. The hard part was believing that there was a God behind all of that. You speak to trying to find the god behind the universe, were not any of those philosophical arguments, like Aristotle’s, the argument for first cause, any of those kinds of things that you need….  Oddly enough, though, I did not find them at all compelling. Nothing was compelling from a rational sense, so that’s what I hear you telling me. So if a Christian would have come up to you during your atheism and said, “Here, I have these arguments for God from a philosophical point of view, from a scientific point of view. There has to be something outside the natural world,” et cetera, all of that, would any of that ever have made a difference to you?  No. Not a bit. I knew them better than most of the Christians who presented them to me, and so they had no effect whatsoever. I knew them. But they were not convincing for you?  No. I think this is probably one of the hugest—is that a word—issues in the apologetics world. Is that we have these compelling arguments, but somehow they just seem to bounce off, as if they have no effect at all, why then do you think that this evidence that’s presented to you would have had no effect? Why do you suppose that was?  Because when you make the fundamental choice at the beginning, you are shaping also what you mean by evidence. And so when you choose to believe that the world has no fundamental value at the base, essentially what you do is you abandon transcendence. We talked about the materialist worldview. So materialism is essentially abandoning any notion of transcendence. So any value is value within the imminent structure of the world, and therefore nothing can point outside of the world. And therefore, you’ll never find evidence for God because it doesn’t exist. By your very starting point, it doesn’t exist. So unless you’re willing to entertain… and I talked with atheists about this, too. It’s like unless you’re willing to entertain the notion that something would be evidence for God, then why are you looking for evidence for God? Because if it can’t possibly exist, you’ve decided the question in advance, and nothing that I give you is going to provide evidence for God. And I was there. I understand it. That’s why I say, at the end of every one of my podcasts, I know both sides of the looking glass, and I know them with open eyes. I recognize that, when you’re an atheist, you’ve made a choice, a fundamental choice, and you’ve concealed it from yourself as a fundamental choice. You think of yourself as an open person who’s willing to entertain any evidence that will come to them. But you’ve decided what counts as evidence in advance, and therefore there is no evidence that will point to God, none. No matter what it is. And I believe that is true of those who say things like, “If I could only go back and witness the miracles of Jesus, then I could believe.” No, you couldn’t. You’ve already decided the question. And just being present there at a miracle would not do it. You would explain the miracle away, because that’s what I did. Yeah. I think that, if anybody looks at any feeds on Twitter, that’s oftentimes what you’ll see, are those just carte blanche dismissals of God. That there’s no evidence. There couldn’t be any evidence. it’s the million dollar question: So if someone is just so…. Their starting point is dismissive of God, of anything supernatural, anything miraculous, there’s no way, then what is it that breaches that? What is it that causes the shift, the change, the movement from closed to open? So back to your story. You were saying that there were holes, through which you entered towards atheism, but yet there were holes in atheism that brought you back towards faith. So talk us through what allows someone who is—you said you saw no way back.  Right. So walk us through that. Just because I’m on the edge of my seat here.  So T.S. Elliott, who’s one of my favorite poets, says, at the end of Four Quartets, “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” And that’s exactly what happened to me. Over those 25 years, I circled again all of those things that made me leave belief in God and came to recognize, when I got to the end of it, that I made the wrong choice back when I threw that switch. And the wrong choice in the sense of I threw away everything that mattered to me. I have always been deeply, deeply in love with meaning and therefore with literature, with science, and I came to see that, if I really wanted to believe in those things and their value and the value of the people around me as sparks of God, as something that has inherent value, if I wanted to believe in those things, that human beings are inherently valuable and that all of those pursuits that we as human beings engage in are valuable, then I needed to also believe in a transcendent notion of value. And if I’m going to do that, I believe in God already. And that’s kind of where I was in 2019, when I first met Jenny, and she was talking to the people in the church. She said one day, “I walked past everybody as they were all sitting in a room praying for the church atheist John Wise to come to Christ,” and I walked past, totally blasé, had no idea what was going on.” And she said she wanted to tell them, “You don’t understand. He already believes. He just doesn’t know it himself. He’s deceived himself about it.” And she was right. Interesting. Yeah. It sounds a bit like C.S. Lewis, doesn’t it? All the things that he valued—joy, meaning, beauty—all the things that he really valued were illusory in a naturalistic worldview, and they were not anything that he could hold on to in any substantive way because they, for him in that worldview, weren’t real. But the things that he could believe in were mundane.  Yeah. Oddly enough, the reason I walked away was that I didn’t have confidence in the faith. And when I come back, I come back recognizing how incredibly ignorant I am, that I don’t have all the answers, that I’m not even certain there’s a God, but I believe it now at a level that I believe my presence here in my house. That’s as certain as we ever get about anything, I think. And so I left the faith to find certainty and then wandered about in this area where I was looking for it, and when I finally came back to faith, I found the level of certainty that human beings can find about anything in faith. I’ve got no reason ever to leave again, because my belief in God is as solid now as the fact that I’m sitting here talking to you right at this moment. And that’s not something I ever had before in my life. And if it took 25 years to get here, thank God for those 25 years. You obviously seem very confident in your belief in God, that it is, in a sense, true that Christ is the truth. Oftentimes in apologetics, we’ll be going after the rational arguments. But here what you’re telling us is, again from C.S. Lewis, is it’s almost like the argument for desire, that there are things in our own humanity that cry out for satisfaction, whether it’s meaning, we’re constantly searching for meaning. Like he says, if there’s thirst, well, there’s such a thing as water. If there’s hunger, there’s such a thing as food. And for us, as humans, we search for meaning, value, for dignity, for all of those things that make life worth living. If we crave those things, then they’re probably real in some sense, not just make believe that they’re actually there. And I know an atheist might be shaking his head on that one, but we’re constantly craving to make sense of our own lives. And I think what you’re telling us is that that really can only be found if the transcendent exists in the person of God. All of those things that we crave in our humanity. And so, in your atheism, you knew, at least you came to a place where you knew, that those things were not accessible. Really, they don’t exist. Those values, those objective standards, again the things we crave in our humanity.   Yep. They’re real or they’re not. And if they’re not real, if you go down that pathway, I think we end up in Auschwitz. I think that is the pathway that leads us to all of the horrors that we human beings are capable of. That’s another reason that, after 25 years, I look at it, and I say, “There are two paths, fundamentally two paths, and you choose them at a level of value and not really at a level of rationality.” And I have to be careful there because I make all of the rational arguments. And what allowed me to come back to Christ was recognizing that belief in God is a completely rational thing to do, and that, in fact, there is no rationality outside of some notion of belief in… okay, if you don’t want to call it God, in some sort of transcendent reality. And for me, we keep going back to C.S. Lewis. So I read C.S. Lewis’s probably Surprised by Joy back when I was in Bible college, but never during those 25 years. And I’ve read it several times since. And it’s like I find my life followed that same pattern that Lewis talks about. Now, I know that part of your story, too, was, when you think about the embodiment of value, the embodiment of, well, God through Christ. Of course, that’s one thing. But when you actually see the embodiment of Christ through a person here, that it can actually help you imagine who God is and what Christianity is and who Christians are, at least in some sense, that is attractive in a way that perhaps it may not have been when you get other poor examples.  Talk us through that part of your journey, because I know that your wife, Jenny, was a big part of you really seeing how the transcendent can become incarnated, as Lewis says, that we can become like little Christs in a sense. Not God himself. We ourselves are not divine. It’s just that Christ in us is being seen by those who don’t know Him. And somehow, for you, it seems like that was the part of your journey, that you were drawn back towards God because of Jenny. Why don’t you talk about that?  Yeah. Sure. It was the capstone, sort of the finishing touch that God crafted in that 25-year journey. So if you had asked me, while I was an atheist, what the process of education and experience amounts to, I would have said that everything is a process of disillusionment. And what I meant by that is, from the time you’re a child, you’re taught that the world is in such in such a way, and slowly, as you grow, all of those illusions, all of the magic is taken away from you. And at the end, you’re down to the bare bones reality of the world. And it is just the sort of darkness that leads us into the ever-expanding universe, where all the lights go out and everything ceases to be, and there is no such thing as meaning. And so that’s the path I was on for sure. And so, when I was getting to that point, it’s like, “I can’t take this anymore. I want to come back to Christ, but I can’t.” I mean, I always respected Jesus. I loved Jesus. I would have come back in a second if I could by the end, maybe three, four, five years of my atheism. But Christians would talk to me, and I’d say, “I can’t throw the switch. I can’t just make myself believe.” And what was missing, I guess, I guess I know, was a re-illusionment, a sense in which I could see that the ideal could be real. And I lived through a pretty tough marriage, and my first wife died in 2019 in not such great circumstances, and that was rather painful, but it was like, by the end of that, all I wanted was to be free of all of the things that had been keeping me in bondage. And I didn’t realize how much that bondage was self-induced. And so, when I met Jenny, she had just gone through a lot of the same things that I did. Her husband died, and she had had a difficult marriage. And so she and I started texting back and forth as friends. And I thought to myself as my wife was passing, “I don’t want to live alone.” And so I started looking around, but Jenny is a Christian. I’m not a Christian. I know the Christian doctrine well enough that she’s not even an option for me. I did not even allow myself to think in that vein. Of course, that’s another way in which we can be self-deceptive, right? Whether I wanted to think in that vein or not, I was starting to think in that vein. But I started to date. But every woman I looked at, it came back to me, “She’s not Jenny.” And Jenny was kind of like, “That guy’s weird.” She liked talking to me. She’s my friend and stuff. But she also thought I was pretty weird. She’s kind of fun to talk about what our relationship was before, because while I was falling for her, she’s like, “Man, this guy is strange.” But increasingly it became clear to me that all that I had missed all of my life was something she had. And that included the Christianity, of course, because her faith was unshakable. I saw it. And it was different from the evangelical community we were in. It was different from most other Christians that I’d met. It was settled in a way that I didn’t quite understand. And she represented to me what I’d been searching for, not just personally, but ideally in how to relate to the world and how to think about things. And she became…. There’s just no other way to say it, a mini incarnation for me. And she made it evident to me that, regardless of what our connection was, there could be a connection between the transcendent ideal, something that I held in my mind, right? From the time I was a kid, thinking, “Wow, if I could be with someone like that,” and suddenly, there she was. A real human being that instantiated a transcendent ideal. Now, she wasn’t perfect. I don’t mean it in that way, but she struck me as that. And frankly, the impression has just grown stronger after having been married for three years. I’m more in love with her now as an ideal than I was when I idealized her. And so she represented to me a realization of something that I thought was impossible, or that I’d convinced myself was impossible. So Jenny was the real reason why you decided to say yes to God, why you chose again to move back into this world where all of the things that you valued were not illusory, that the Christian worldview had, in a sense, a way of providing the grounding or the source for rationality, for meaning, for purpose, for consciousness. For love, for virtue, for good and evil, all those things that we, in our humanity, desire. But yet you affirmed as well that there are good reasons beyond those even, but that she incarnated Christianity and Christ in a way that was so attractive to you that you turned in a way to say yes to Christ.  For the skeptic who’s saying, “Oh, he just became a Christian because he fell in love with a woman.” I hear that a lot on feedback on social media, and I wondered if a skeptic said that to you, how you would respond.  Oh, I worried about that myself. And I do think others think that sometimes. But for me, and I think for Jenny as well, that ceased to be a problem some time ago. I don’t even worry about it because it is God through Jenny, not Jenny. And there’s nothing good about me. There’s nothing good about her, except that which is given by God. And so I make no apologies. I have not tried to soften it for others who might want to think that way. They can think what they like, and I’m not going to be able to convince them one way or the other. But without a doubt, I absolutely adore my wife, and I would do anything for her. And she instantiates… because she instantiates Christ. It is because I see Christ through her that she has the value that she has, and hopefully the other way around as well. She’s not perfect. I would never make that claim. She’s perfect for me. There’s almost no other way to explain it, because she is my perfect complement. And if that’s what it took for God to bring me back, then so be it. I praise God for that. He knew what it was that I needed to help me to throw that switch, because it really was odd. In the last few years of my atheism, I thought to myself, “If only I could go back, but I can’t. And I never will.” I was convinced I never would. And I was convinced long after I met Jenny and was in love with her that I never would. In fact, that’s one of the things I said to her. I said, “I don’t know what to do, I’m desperately in love with you, but I can’t ask you to violate your Christian commitment.” If she had, she would have lost so much of that value for me because, I mean, that was what was on the line, her own faith. And her faith was part of what appealed to me. And had she violated that faith, she would have destroyed her witness. And so there was one option left, and it wasn’t an option on the table for me. And that process, and I try to explain it as well as I can, in the first eight episodes of The Christian Atheist. I try to explain that process whereby God made the moves to change my heart or my life or my reasoning or whatever it was that was necessary to open up that door again and allow me to flip the switch. Yeah, I love that. It’s a mystery, right? It’s a mystery how and why sometimes we believe the way that we do, why we’re closed off to certain things, open to others. But more than that, I think it really is a mystery of how God can soften our hearts and change our minds and change our lives and bring us to a point of seeing truth in a new and fresh way. And I praise God for the work that he’s done in you and through you, and that you seem to be incredibly passionate now about your faith. And I love what you said at the beginning, too, where you and Jenny have a podcast, and that, in some sense—and I’m rephrasing—that all of reality points to God. So you’ve moved from a place where, that you’re not just embracing God because you found a woman who embodied these beautiful Christian virtues. You actually see all of reality, philosophically, rationally, scientifically, whatever, existentially. Everything points to God, and so that whereas the evidence once was lost because your worldview didn’t allow for that, like you say, you just don’t even think it’s possible. To now, everything can’t help but be evidence for God. It feels like a very fully orbed transformation.  Yeah. I am utterly convinced that when, in Genesis, God says, “God saw that it was good,” that that is the foundation on which faith is built. You either start there or you go the other direction. And Hebrews 11:6 that I quoted earlier, that someone who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. If you start with the idea that the world has been created in a good way, that the world around us is good, you’re on the path. And that is my goal, to put people on that path, because I think, as soon as you’re on that path, you will find God. Ask, seek, and knock. And if you’re not knocking at the right door, then you’re not on the path. But if you’re looking at the world around you, and you’re seeking the truth, you really want to find the truth, then you will find God, and you’ll find Him everywhere because that’s how He set up His world. It’s like once you see it’s hard to unsee.  Yes. And that is a really great word for the skeptic. Anything else you would advise? If somebody says, “John, I want to want that. I want to believe that. I want to choose that. But I just can’t.” Is there any other way that you might advise them? Because I know you were in that position, right? You didn’t think there was ever a possibility of you moving towards God again? Any other things that you might suggest for the skeptic?  It’s not an easy answer. I’ve run across people like that, and I honestly don’t know what makes the final step other than God. It really is a mystery. And I fully embrace the idea that God is the eternal mystery. We will never get to be able to plumb the depths of who He is and what He does and how it happens. And embracing that mystery is the only path forward. And when and how God does it, I don’t know. It is a mystery. But what I tell others is keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking, because He promises the door will be opened if you do that. That’s the best I can do. Yeah. It reminds me of a book by Esther Meek. I believe she’s a philosopher, where she says it’s a bit like looking at a hidden 3D image. You know those pictures? But you have to be intentional about finding the image inside of the picture. And so there has to be almost an intentionality towards searching, or towards looking, before you even see it, before you even begin to see it there. I think it comes back down to what you were saying: There has to, in some way, be a choice, a choice to be open and look. I have a long series called “The Evidence and Faith,” in which I talk about the nature of evidence. And I do think that the world is the evidence. I think God has set up this world in which we live as filled with good, and all of that good points to Him. And we have to open our eyes and see it and embrace it and not reject it, not take the little bits that we see for the whole, but look to where all of the parts point us. I think that’s really excellent counsel, because I think sometimes we can look at one small thing or bad circumstance and throw the baby out with the bathwater, instead of looking at the whole. Look at the comprehensive. That’s a discussion for another day. For those who really have a burden just like you do: You want others to see, to choose towards God. Or in thinking of Jenny in your life, even, and the beautiful example and the draw that the Lord used through her to Himself, how would you encourage Christians to engage or to live in front of atheists or skeptics or whomever they want to know God?  I would say, from my experience, be intensely human, and don’t try too hard to be a Christian. Just live. Live as God calls you to live, do what He asks you to do, and don’t get caught up in the notion of what you have to do as a Christian. I think Christianity is much more of a life than it is a series of words that we speak. We find that in church, too. It’s like people walk in, and suddenly they have to be this certain type of thing, and instead of just being who God made them to be, with all the flaws, all the failings, just be you, be honestly you. Express your doubts, what you know, what you don’t know, what you really feel, the things that make you question. Stop being afraid, Christians, to face the fact that we don’t have all the answers, because we don’t. And we may have a hope that they don’t have, but then live that hope. Just show the hope in your everyday existence. Thinking of hope, I’m sure you saw it in Jenny as she was losing probably her first husband, but yet she had a hope eternal, right?  Yes. Exactly. You saw her walk through just devastating circumstances, but yet with a faith that was unwavering, and there’s something very attractive about that, I think.  Absolutely. Yeah. Anything else you want to add about your journey today, John, that you want to include? I am absolutely enthralled with the life God has given. This is an amazing world. It is an amazing chance to live and interact and try our best to serve our maker. I love living my life now, and it’s not…. Before, it was this process of disillusionment. Well, now it’s a process of re-illusionment because it keeps getting better and better. As you get to know God better, get to know others better, and try. You have this opportunity to correct all of the things that you’ve screwed up through your life, and trust me, I’ve had plenty of them, and thank God we have it. Well, it sounds like a life worth living, and I’m sure that you’re one of those who make the Christian life attractive to those who don’t believe as well. I know that you have given us a lot of wisdom today, and I’ve been enthralled by your story. It’s just so interesting and compelling and honest, I hope that our listeners will go and listen to your Christian Atheist podcast, as well as the other ones that you and Jenny have. You just obviously have so much to offer. So thank you so much for coming on today.  Thank you, Jana. Actually, I’m looking forward to reading your research, too, in any form that you are able to get it to me, because I’m fascinated about the ways in which atheists make the turn. Thank you for the opportunity. God bless. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear John Wise’s story. You can find out more about him and his wife, Jenny, where you can follow them on social media, as well as links to his Christian Atheist podcast in the episode notes below. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website at www.sidebstories.com. Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist, and you would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you’ll follow our podcast, that you’ll rate, review, and share it with your friends and social network. Again, we welcome your thoughts about this episode and our podcast on our Side B Stories Facebook page.  In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their lives. 

Former atheist Mark Goodnight rejected God because of tragic life circumstances. After years of self-destructive living, he became convinced God was real through a series of unexpected events. Mark’s Resources: Blog: https://cyberpenance.wordpress.com/ Twitter: GospelApologist Instagram: @martyrtek Resources recommended by Mark: Tactics, Greg Koukl Forensic Faith, Jim Warner Wallace Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist and you would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected.  It’s often thought that religious people are religious because that’s how they were raised. It is the context in which their beliefs were formed. The same can be true of atheists, who may have absorbed their beliefs on the back of their home or culture, or on the back of their life experience. Context sets the stage towards belief or disbelief in God. While context does not determine the truth of the belief, it can and does bear influence on the acceptance of a belief, upon its plausibility, on what seems true or what seems attractive, whether it is worth considering in the first place.  It’s not surprising then, that someone rejects God because of bad things that happen in life, especially as a child. When life is difficult, it becomes hard to see how a good or caring God exists. If He did exist, why did He allow such horrible things to happen? Couldn’t He have prevented it? Why didn’t He? It’s also been proposed that atheism is born from a childhood experience of a physically or emotionally absent or abusive father, that it would be incredibly difficult to believe in a loving God when your own father is far from that. That could be the case for some, but certainly not for all atheists. That is, there seems to be a correlation between bad experience with a parent and rejection in belief in God. In my research with fifty former atheists, one out of every eight expressed that troubled or absent relationships with their mothers contributed to their atheism. And approximately one out of every four, about 28%, reported that a difficult or absent relationship with their father created resistance to belief.  In today’s story, former atheist Mark Goodnight strongly rejected the existence of God from an early age, embracing everything that was opposite of a healthy life, moving into some very, very dark realities. Now he lives and speaks as a bold and vibrant ambassador for Christ. What happened that changed Mark’s mind about God and changed his entire direction in life? I hope you’ll come along to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Mark. It’s so great to have you.  Thank you for having me. Wonderful! As we’re getting started, to let the listeners know a little bit about you now, can you give us an idea of perhaps where you live, what you do as work or your ministry or whatever you want to tell us?  Yeah, I currently live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Actually, I’ve lived here most of my life, and I work in IT for a company out of DC, so I work remotely, and I’ve been happily married for 13 years now. I’m currently a Reasonable Faith chapter director, and I help answer some of the questions of the week and recently changed churches, so I’m getting involved in a new church. So you grew up in the Midwest of the United States. Tell me about your early life there. I know Oklahoma. It’s not the Bible Belt, but certainly there’s a strong Christian influence in that area of the country.  Yeah. We jokingly call it the buckle of the Bible Belt. I grew up with an older sister and a younger brother, and my mom and dad. We grew up in a mobile home park out in the middle of nowhere. So as you were growing up with your family, was there God or religion or faith? Was that any part of your upbringing at home?  Yeah. So my grandma on my mom’s side was very devout and religious, and my uncle, my mom’s brother, was a deacon in Episcopalian Church, and mom took us to church. I probably embraced it at a young age. Probably around the age of seven, I asked to be baptized and got somewhat involved at a younger age but started questioning it by the time I was twelve. Okay, so you did have what you would consider a real faith as a child, or a childlike faith, where you went to church, you believed in God. I presume you prayed to God, believed he was real, but then you started questioning that. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?  Yeah. So while my mom did her best to raise us in a religious family, my dad, he wasn’t totally against it, but my dad was both an alcoholic and a workaholic, so he was rarely home, and when he was home, he was drunk. But I started noticing that we were all going to church and he wasn’t going to church on Sundays, and it was like, “Well, if he doesn’t have to go to church, I don’t have to go to church.” So I sort of started stepping away when I was twelve, and looking back on it, I think I did turn my back on the church at the age of twelve, which kind of started the downhill slide. By the time I was 14 or 15, I rejected God and actually asked Satan into my life. Okay. That’s a pretty strong turn.  Yeah. So it makes me feel or think that there’s something more to the story than just that your father didn’t go, so you didn’t want to go.  Right. Talk us through some more of that.  Yeah. So, with my dad being an alcoholic, alcohol was sort of an issue with me from an early age. There were tales of…. I mean, there’s pictures of me drinking beer at six months, and they would put beer in my bottle to get me to go to sleep or calm down, or even to get me calm down enough to give me a haircut when I was a baby. By the time I was four, I was drinking his scotch. Not like full drinks, but I’d walk up and take a drink, and he’d laugh and be like, “Take another one.” But when I was five, I was sexually abused by a babysitter. And even at that age, I tried to kill myself and told my mom I wanted to die at the age of five. So me turning to God at the early age…. I already knew something was wrong with me, and I was trying to find peace. I guess that’s the only way I can think of it from that age. I was just trying to find an answer to things. I will say that the entire time that I was seeking God at that early age, I didn’t have any issues. But once I started turning my back on the church, and then my parents separated when I was 14, so around the time that I asked Satan into my life, I also emptied out my mom’s medicine cabinet and put myself in the hospital for a week. And then they sent me to a dozen psychiatrists through junior high and high school years to try and find out what was wrong with me. And by the time I graduated high school, I was classified as a level five neurotic by the state of Oklahoma. And then in college, it got worse. In high school and college, I started dabbling in the occult. And then in college, I got into drugs, which really put me over the edge psychologically. Right. So again, walk me through. There’s one sense in which someone stops believing in God, in a sense. There’s another sense in which… when you say you asked Satan into your life, that’s full-fledged rejection and really running in the opposite direction.  Yes, it is. With almost a contemptuousness or a defiance. When you’re asking Satan into your life and then move towards occult things, that can move into a very dark place. Obviously you had experienced a lot of darkness as a child, so I don’t want to presume. Why did you move towards asking Satan into your life and move towards the occult?  So when my parents separated, it really hit me hard. Like, I was just starting to get to know my dad, and my mum kicked my dad out of the house. And I didn’t even talk to my mom for like two weeks. I wouldn’t even be in the same room with her. The whole time leading up to it and afterwards, I would do a lot of praying. Like, “God, I want you to save my parents’ marriage,” you know, and as a kid, you don’t understand that people have free will. You can pray for things, but people have free will, and people can do… they’re going to do what they’re going to do sometimes. And that’s not saying that God doesn’t step in and do miracles, but there has to be that repentant heart and seeking towards God in that relationship. So me praying for my parents was… I didn’t see anything, and it was like, “Well, then. Screw you, God.” Okay.  And then in the occult, it was more dabbling, just playing around. It wasn’t like serious or anything. I definitely saw a bunch of things in high school and college, but it wasn’t like… I guess in some ways I say it wasn’t like devoting my life to it. But then in college, I did automatic writing with my “guardian spirit” for a year and a half and had books full of things this spirit would say to me. So there was some sense in which you believed in a spiritual realm, right? So you believed in a dark spiritual realm, but not necessarily in God or the devil.  I knew the devil was real. I knew demons were real. I knew the supernatural existed. Just never thought that God actually cared enough to interact in our lives like that. Okay. So then you were saying that you were in college, you were pursuing, just dabbling in the occult, but also in drugs, and that you were still walking in a bit of a dark place. Take us from there.  Yes. So I ended up dropping out of college and just like going almost full fledged into drugs. There were probably three, four years that there wasn’t a waking moment that I was not chemically altered in one way or another. And by the end of it, I would tell people, “Drugs are my God. Drugs are the only thing that care about me.” So I ended up in Dallas and was getting heavily involved in coke, cocaine, and had dabbled with crack and everything. And I knew that things were getting bad, like really bad in my life. And I ended up calling my sister one night, at 3:30 in the morning. And the whole reason I was in Dallas was because I’ve been kicked out of the house and had no place to go and had a friend set me up in Dallas. So I called my sister at 3:30 in the morning and kind of told her everything that was going on. And I was like, “Look, things are looking bad. Things are going to get worse.” And she told me, “Hold on!” She said she was going to call mom first thing in the morning, and then she was going to reach back out to me, and she told me, “Just stay strong, hold on, and I’ll call you in the morning.” And I got off the phone, and I said the first prayer I’d said in years. And the prayer was basically…. It started with, “God, if you are real….” Like, I didn’t even know if God was real. I didn’t know if I believed in God or anything like that. But I was just like, “God, if you’re real, I need help.” And at 7:30 in the morning, my sister calls me back. And she was like, “Okay, I spoke to mom. You can come home. I don’t know how we’re going to get you home yet, but I’m working on it. Stay strong, and I’ll call you back.” And I put the phone down. And this is like, to this day, it’s freaky because I put the phone down, and no sooner…. This was back before cell phones. This is ‘91, ‘92. So I put the phone down on the cradle, and as soon as it hit the cradle, it rang again. So I was like, “Okay.” So I answered the phone. And it was my cousin. Now, my cousin lived in Kansas City. I’m in Dallas. And he said that he had driven to Dallas for a few days and wanted to hook up. And it was like, “Oh, my God! You’re my way home,” because he had to drive through Tulsa to go back home. That’s right.  And it was just like, “Holy cow! Wait a minute. God, You’re real.” Wow.  And I’m a very stubborn and slow person, so it was still a couple of years before I surrendered to Christ. But I mean, at that point there, I believed that God was real. Okay. Because He had shown up. The God who didn’t seem to show up actually showed up when you said this feeble little prayer.  Right. He heard it.  Right. He heard it, and He answered it in a way that I couldn’t shake and I couldn’t deny. And I get back to Tulsa, and of course, I’m still doing drugs, and mom isn’t having it, so she kicks me out of the house again, and I go live with my sister. And I’m still doing drugs the whole time, and I jump from one job to another because I’m doing drugs, and I end up moving to Tulsa with a friend of mine, and things are going bad. And during this time, I’m still dealing with all the depression and suicidal tendencies that have plagued me from the age of five. And obviously, drugs are not helping. But when you’re doing drugs, you can’t tell that. Because I’d been to see psychiatrists throughout my life, and I tried religion, I thought, as a kid, and dabbled in the occult and done drugs, illegal drugs, legal drugs, and none of it was helping. It was like, “Well, screw it. I gotta help myself.” And I buy this book at Waldenbooks called How to Cope with Depression. And I had psychology classes in high school and college, and the book didn’t teach me a single thing that I didn’t already know, but there was something that stuck out to me in the appendix, and it said 90% of depressives turn to religion for help. It’s like, “Well, okay. What else have I got to lose? Because I desperately need help.” So I asked my mom for a Bible, which I know had to really shock her. Oh, I’m sure.  So I got a Bible, and I started reading it, and I’m living here in Tulsa. It’s like three of us in a two bedroom apartment, and I’m working graveyard. And when you’re working graveyard, it’s very easy to lose track of what day it is, just because everything’s at night. And I had a habit of getting off work, coming home, getting high, and reading the Bible, which is… I don’t recommend that, but that’s where I was at at that time. And it’s Sunday morning. Or I’d get high and watch cartoons or whatever. And it’s Sunday morning, and I don’t realize it’s Sunday, and I had a really rough night, and so I’m getting high, and I’m flipping through channels, and there’s no cartoons on, and there’s some old dude talking. I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s hear what this dude has to say.” And before I realize it, it’s Oral Roberts. I was not a fan of TV evangelists, and Oral Roberts was at the top of my case of the ones I was not a fan of, but by the time I realized it was Oral Roberts, I was hooked on what he was saying. And so he turns to the TV, and he does his altar call and then turns to the TV and says, “All you all that want to ask Jesus into your life, get on your knees and lift your hands up in the air,” and I’m like putting my drug paraphernalia down and getting on my knees and lifting my hands in the air and repeating this prayer after him. And I felt something. I would tell people, “I saw something come out of the ceiling.” Whether it was a drug thing or whatever, I felt something, and it invigorated me. And the very next night, I was partying with my friends, and I told them. I was like, “You’ll never guess what I did! I think I asked Jesus into my life,” which was ironic because not six months before, I was telling my friends, “If I ever become a Christian, take a gun and blow my brains out and put me out of my misery.” And that’s a direct quote. So they started challenging me about stuff, which is kind of funny and ironic. All I’ve got is I’m reading the Bible. I picked up Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest, which I still read to this day. Fantastic book. And so for the next nine months, I’m getting high every day, I’m reading the Bible, and I’d read something in the Bible, and it’s like, “Oh, I should probably change this in my life.” And just making baby steps, basically. Right. So you weren’t going to church at this point. You weren’t with any other Christians at this point.  No. Obviously, you had a real disdain for Christians, right? You didn’t want to be one, and then you found yourself believing. Just as a side note, why the disdain for Christians? Why the hatred towards them?  It was a number of things. At its core, I knew I would have to change my life. Okay.  Some of the disdain was because, and if you have any Christians that listen to your podcast, let them take this as a lesson, but some of the disdain was I was working in the restaurant industry, and churches would come over Wednesday night as they let out, like 15 minutes before we closed, or Sunday night as they let out, and they were the worst people we had. Oh, my.  And they didn’t tip. They treated our staff like crap. And it’s like, “You guys are Christians? I don’t want to be one.”For me, it’s like any time I go to restaurant, I tip. Always try and be nice, and if they get your food wrong, you can say, “Hey, my food is wrong,” in a nice way. You don’t have to be a jerk about it, because if you’re going to pray and bless your food, they’re going to see it, and they’re going to know you’re a Christian. Whether you witness to them or not, they’re going to know it. So people just have to think about that, right? Right. So again, you’re still on drugs, reading your Bible.  Right. Right. That’s an interesting combination. Keep going.  Yeah. But God has grace for us, and it’s like… He accepts us the way we are, but He doesn’t leave us the way we are. And sometimes it’s like a radical transformation, and sometimes it’s a slow one. So I asked Jesus into my life in September of ‘94, and by this time at work, I was working as a stocker overnight, graveyard at a grocery store, and I had somehow become the crew chief, which is like, “How did that happen?” But we had a Christian come in to work under us, and he was going to Bible college, and he was like studying during his lunch break. And I was being nice to him and everything, and he was like, “You want to go to church sometime?” And I’m like, “Yeah, sure. Whatever.” And there was a Sunday in February, and I couldn’t tell you when it was. Like I said, I was high all the time. But he showed up at my house or at my apartment right after I had just got done getting high, knocking on my door, and he’s like, “You want to go to church?” And I’m like, “Did I say I’d go to church?” He’s like, “Yes.” “Okay, when?” “Now.” “Okay.” So I ended up getting dragged to this church like higher than a kite. And I sit in the back in the bleachers, and the pastor’s giving this message, and it’s like, “That’s kind of cool,” and he does his altar call, and he’s like, “Everybody bow your head, and close your eyes, and anyone who wants to answer the altar call, ask Jesus into their lives, put your hands up in the air,” and I’m kind of like feebly putting my hands up, and I look up, and he’s looking the other way. So I put my hand down, and some dude starts tapping me on the back saying, “Hey, it’s all right. You can do it,” and I was so furious, and I was so high. It was everything in me not to just turn around and start beating the crap out of this guy, because I didn’t have an aspect of social graces. So me kind of controlling myself was actually a grace in itself. But anyway, so I leave there and I’m like, “I’m never going back to church.” And I don’t even remember this a couple of months later. Like I said, I was so high. And Easter of that year, Easter is coming up, and I’m like, “Hey, Easter is like a Christian holiday. If I’m a Christian, I should go to church.” So I call up my sister, and we find a church, and it’s like this Southern Baptist country church. And I actually, for the first time in a couple of years, I don’t even get high when I first wake up. I at least waited till after I got out of church. So I went to church sober and in a straight mind, which was completely radical for me at that time. Right. It was a step forward for sure.  Yeah. And I liked it so much that it was like, “Okay, I want to go back.” So the next Sunday, I go back with my sister. And the very next night, one of my friend’s girlfriends heard that I was getting into church, and she was like, “Hey, you want to go to church?” I was like, “Sure, yeah, I’ll check it out. What have you got?” Because I’ve been twice, so I’m like, “This is kind of cool.” So she took me to this church called Guts. It’s called Guts?  It’s called Guts. Yeah. Is there a reason for that?  It takes a lot of guts to stand for Jesus, is what the pastor always said. Okay.  And it wasn’t even the regular pastor. It was a guest speaker. But he did an altar call, and I’m like immediately one of the first people down there on the altar call, and he prays for people who are addicted to drugs. And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s me.” So he laid his hands on me and prayed for me. And any desire for drugs just left me. Immediately.  Immediately. Like, I went home and threw away hundreds of dollars worth of paraphernalia and didn’t have any problem. That’s astonishing!   Yeah. And then I’m like, “We got to go back to this church. This church is cool.” Because it was like a rock and roll church. And like, I listened to heavy metal, so it’s like you’re more in my vein than like a Southern Baptist church. And so, for the next three weeks, every service, I’m there Wednesday and Sunday. And every service, I’m just in tears and I’m answering the altar call because I am a despicable human being and I need Jesus. And if I’ve got to answer that alter call numerous times, I’m going to do it. And about three weeks later, I was still dealing with the depression and suicidal tendencies that had plagued me since the age of five. And so I answered the altar call, and at the time, they were taking everybody in the back room, and they’d have ministry people pray with you. And I made sure I was the last person to leave the room. And I copped the associate pastor, and I told him a lot of what I’ve told you here right now, as far as the depression and suicidal tendencies. And he prayed for me and laid his hands on me, and I felt better than I ever felt. I felt like I was high, but I wasn’t on drugs, right? Right. It was a spiritual high.  Yeah, absolutely! Absolutely! I didn’t know that at the time, but it was just like, “This is crazy!” And I get up the very next morning, and that depression and suicidal hurt hits me like a ton of bricks. And I was standing in the bathroom with a razor to my wrist, which wasn’t anything new. I mean, I would carve them. At the height of my drugs, I would carve on myself with knives. So I’ve still got scars on myself from stuff that I did to myself. Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah.  Well, I mean, God’s a good God. I’ll just say that. And so I’m standing in the bathroom with a razor to my wrist, and these words come out of my mouth, and it was so foreign to me, but these words came out of my mouth. “I can’t be about these things anymore. My life is not my own now. I belong to God.” And as soon as I said those words, and I was like, “Where is this coming from in my mind?” But as soon as I said those words, that depression and suicidal tendencies left me like that. Amazing! And I can tell you. That was ‘95. It’s 2022 now, and I haven’t had any issues like that. There is natural depression, a loved one dying. When my mom passed away or my dad passed away or my sister passed away. There is a natural, healthy sadness that hits you. If you haven’t dealt with depression or suicidal tendencies or anything like that, you can’t imagine, because those are like the tip of the iceberg to what you would feel with the kind of depression that I had. And yeah, I mean, like I said, ‘95. It’s now 2022, and I haven’t had any issues. And I’ve even had atheists tell me, “You got to watch yourself because you’re going to fall back.” It’s like, “Yeah, okay. Well, it’s been 27 years now. When’s that fallback going to happen?” Because it ain’t. Right, right. Wow. That’s extraordinary, to be suddenly released. I mean, first of all from your drug addiction and then from your depression, I mean serious, serious depression, on the back of a prayer. Someone praying over you. I imagine, whatever power you saw in your earlier life in the occult dabbling that you did, this power, whatever this power was that came upon you, to release you or free you from these oppressions in your life and addictions and depressions. I mean, obviously, the God who answered your prayer in 1991, He kept showing up for you in these incredibly personal and powerful ways.  Yeah. And that kind of healing, it’s like, “Okay, I’m in. Wherever this goes, I’m in.” It didn’t stop, because a couple months later, like I started smoking cigarettes when I was twelve, and by the time I hit college, it was a pack a day. Through my drug years, it could be up to two packs a day, and that’s a serious addiction unto itself. And I realized, it’s like, “Okay, I should probably try and quit smoking.” And I quit for like two weeks. And in two weeks I was just a nervous wreck. I mean, I would meet people and say, “Hi, I’m Mark. I’m trying to quit smoking. Don’t piss me off.” Okay. Fair warning.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that lasted about two weeks, and I was immediately back to a pack a day. And I was still working at that grocery store, but now I was no longer on graveyard, and I was head over like shipping and receiving, and so I’d be in the back, and I could be by myself sometimes. And so I’m sitting in the back room waiting on a delivery, and I’m smoking a cigarette, and I think it was like my second or third of the day or whatever, and I heard a voice. And it said, the voice I heard said, “Put your cigarette out, throw your pack away, and rely on Me for your strength and endurance.” And I literally got up and looked around like, “Who said that?” And I mean, I’m the only one in the back. I’m like, “What the heck? I must have imagined it.” So I sit back down. I hear the exact same voice, exact same tone, exact same words, everything. And I’m like, “Okay, I may not be the smartest chip on the block, but I think God is trying to talk to me,” so I sat there for a couple of minutes just really thinking about it. And so I did. I put the cigarette out. I went over to the trash can and took the pack of cigarettes out of my pocket, and I held it over the trash can and I was like, “All right, God. I think you’re speaking to me, but I don’t know if this is You or not. So if it’s you, I’m going to need You to be my strength and endurance because I already tried this, and I can’t do this myself.” And I threw the pack away, and I was delivered like that. Again. Wow. That’s truly, truly extraordinary. These immediate deliverances from these very, very strong addictions. Physical addictions.  Yeah. And it’s been 27 years, and I’m still a Christian. I still read my Bible every single day. Well, even in your own life, it was a slow process, and it took a long time for you to even come to the point where you were even willing to say, “God, if you’re real….” You yourself, you weren’t pushed there. You had to reach that point yourself, where you were willing to even consider it. And everyone is on their own time, right?  Exactly. But I’m also intrigued by your story in the sense that you made the comment, and I think it’s often heard, but I think your life really shows us is that you come as you are, that God accepts you as you are, but He doesn’t leave you there. It’s a process of change over time, and maybe some who are listening are going, “Well, he didn’t act like a Christian when he first accepted Christ, but that was- I definitely didn’t! No. But it took a while, right? It was a journey for you of transformation that was, again, kind of a slow burn, but you were making steps forward. It just took a lot of time. I’m sure that there were some people, some of your friends who perhaps would say, “Oh, yeah, he says he’s a Christian, but look at him.” But it takes time, right? It takes time and patience. God is so patient with us.  Yeah. Thank goodness, too. He’s so very patient. But, anyway, since that time, obviously that was back in the nineties. And here we are in 2022. Talk about the transformation in your life that has occurred. Obviously, there’s been a great deal of maturity and transformation that has occurred even since then. Wow. In 2020, I celebrated being a Christian for half my life. I’m a lot more loving and accepting of people. I understand that some people can get just changed overnight, and some people are born saints, God bless them, but there’s other of us that we’re like a kicking and screaming baby that has to be dragged. But God can still work on people, and you can never give up hope on someone because you never know what’s going to happen with them. I mean, in my own life, from those days, I committed to reading the Bible every single day. And you find so much in the word if you just… For me, I read it cover to cover, just because I’m analytical like that. But I’ve been through some discipleship training. I’ve been through some internship that was like a total God thing. Being an intern for a year in the mid 2000s was as radical a change in my life is getting saved was. In what way?  Well, getting saved, obviously, I changed from hating Christians to saying, “Hey, now I am a Christian,” and getting delivered from drugs and getting delivered from depression, suicidal tendencies, and getting delivered from smoking. So the change in my life from the internship was getting more confident, understanding that I can actually get up in front of people and give a message. I’ve taught a couple of classes on apologetics now, which is like, “How did I get here?” But that’s like the story of my life for the last 27 years is, “How did I get here?” Right, right.  And I always look at it as like, “Hey, I’m just in God’s hands, along for the ride. Wherever He takes me is where I’m going.” That’s good. Obviously, you’ve gotten married. Incredibly, you’re obviously sober in body, but sober in mind, and you’ve accomplished a lot of things since that time. One more question before we go to the advice. I’m just thinking of someone’s listening, and they’re thinking to themselves, “You just got saved. I mean, like, you just called out to Jesus. What is that? What do you mean saved? That just sounds like Christian lingo.” Obviously, in many ways it sounds like a full surrender of your life to God, but how does that work? What do you mean by, “I got saved?”  I think you know that it’s a surrender to God through His Son. I mean it’s seeking God through Jesus. I mean, Jesus says in John 14:6, “I’m the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to God except through Me.” And Romans 10:9-10 says that if you confess with your heart, if you believe in your heart that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and rose from the dead three days later, and if you confess with your mouth, you will be saved. And I mean, that’s what it means. It means that, “God, I believe that You’re real. God, I believe that Your Son truly existed and died on the cross, that the stories and the gospels are true.” And you don’t have to be like, every word is true. It’s the context of the message, the resurrection, that He did this to help redeem us, so that we could have that relationship with God, so that we could be washed from our sins, because every one of us sins. I mean, I’ve been a Christian for 27 years. I still sin every day. My sins may have changed, and they’re not as bad as they were, but we all sin, and we all need that healing. We all need to be cleansed from our sins, and there’s nothing that can wash away our sins. It’s like that old hymn, “What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Yeah. I’m sure that there are many atheists that you’ve encountered that kind of rebuff your story or just don’t believe it. I can’t imagine that they would just accept these sudden deliverances. But you are a walking testimony of the reality of God and the power in His life to free you and to heal you, in a sense, and move you from brokenness to wholeness. You are a beautiful, embodied example of that. Your life alone is an amazing testimony, and I love the words that you’re putting to it as you’re walking us through it. If there’s a curious skeptic who’s listening to your story and is kind of on their heels in disbelief going, “I just….”  Right. But in some way, like you say, we all know there’s something wrong with us. We’re all craving for things to be right and good and to have that internal joy and that wholeness that you’re speaking of. And they might be willing to say, “Hey, God, if you’re real….” What would you say to someone who actually perhaps has just that moment of willingness, to say, “Hey, God, if you’re real….”  Well, I mean, to the skeptic I would say, “Hey, I was there.” I mean, I went through this stuff. You just heard my story. And as I was going through it, I was like, “This can’t be real.” But it is. To the person that is at that moment, reach out, have that moment of faith, just give God a chance and see if He’ll show up, because there’s tale after tale of people who have had that moment of God showing up and rescuing them from something. But we have to be sincere about it. It can’t be just, “Oh, God, I want to see your laser light show.” I mean, to me, when I prayed that prayer, it was like end of my rope desperation, because I honestly knew I’d be dead in a month or two if I didn’t get out of that situation. And I don’t know why… As a Christian, I know that God loves us enough. Isaiah 43:4 says that God calls us precious in His sight, which I had a revelation of how much God loves me through that verse that I felt like I had the wind knocked out of me for two days from Isaiah 43:4. So I know that He cherishes every one of us. I mean, there’s countless scriptures about how much God loves us. Jesus says that He knows the very number of hairs on our head, or not hair on my head, but He provides sustenance for the birds, and aren’t we not worth more than that? The Bible says that we’re the apple of His eye. I mean, He truly loves us, each one of us, individually, and we have to be willing to receive Him. The years I was resisting God, and sometimes giving Him the middle finger, He wasn’t acting in my life because I didn’t want Him to act in my life. C.S. Lewis put it great, as far as there are those that say to God, Your will be done, and there are those that God says to them, “Okay, your will be done.” He loves us enough to allow us free will to accept Him or reject Him, and Him accepting you, to me it’s an adventure. I mean, you don’t know what’s going to happen because God shows up. I don’t know. He has for me continually. Even this year. I mean, there’s tale after tale. I’m telling the big ones that got me started on this journey, but I could go on, almost every year, sometimes multiple times a year, just God continually showing up and being faithful. And I think it’s in 1 Timothy or 2 Timothy that Paul writes that God is faithful even when we’re faithless. Right.  That’s very good. Obviously, too, Mark, you have a very deep and abiding love for the Bible, or what we call God’s word, and you invest in it, and you read it, and it’s obviously coming out of you. Now, when you were very first…. From the very beginning, you got a Bible from your mother, and you started reading it. So it’s been a practice for you, even in those early, early days when you may not have known what was going on. If a skeptic is willing to pick up a Bible, maybe for the first time, it can be a little bit intimidating and not knowing where to begin.  Yes, it can! And my biggest advice is do not start in Genesis. Okay.  Start in the New Testament. Okay. So just start with the stories or the biographies of Jesus?  Yeah. Maybe Matthew or Mark? Or do you have a favorite book or letter?  Well, my favorite book is actually Psalms, but for someone who’s just getting into it: So Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, they’re each written to a different audience. And I really think of it like, okay, are you like, just give me the facts person, and you want just the action, then read Mark, because it’s short and sweet and to the point. And it’s also what I was named after. And usually I’m short and sweet and to the point. And then Matthew is sort of written to the religious minded. And Luke is written to the intellectual. And John is written to all the rest, I guess, is the best way, because he was the last one, anyways. But read them. And there’s a great book, probably one of my favorite books out there is The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona. And even if the Bible isn’t true in every word, which, I mean, I believe it is, don’t get me wrong. No, I understand.  But if you just approach the Bible as a historic document, the core facts of it show that Jesus existed, that He died on the cross, that three days later His tomb was found empty, that His disciples had experiences, that they believed that they saw Jesus from the dead. That Paul, a persecutor of the church, suddenly became a believer. That James, the brother of Jesus, who didn’t believe in Jesus before He died on the cross, became a believer and became a head of the church. And you’ve got to address theories that try and explain those, and only the resurrection covers all of them without being ad hoc or multiple theories, which just makes your theory even worse. And it’s a great book that just covers those five facts and the historical reliability of just those five facts. I mean I know that there are some Christian theologians that don’t like the minimal facts theory or the minimal facts argument. But for me, as a former skeptic, it just rings true with me. It’s like, if someone would have told me that, given me that argument while I was a skeptic, I may not have accepted it immediately, but it would have planted a seed in me, where it was like, “I can’t stop thinking about that,” type of thing. Yeah. That’s really wonderful evidence. If someone is willing to look at the evidence from a historical point of view, from even skeptical historians can’t deny those facts.  Right. So it’s very, very powerful. Thank you for raising that. And for the Christian who’s listening, I know you had kind of given some advice to us Christians in terms of engaging, like when you were talking about your brother. What would you say to the Christian who really does… they have a skeptic in their life or that they love and they want to see come to Christ? How would you- Never give up. Okay.  I mean, don’t give up. Don’t stop praying for them. You never know what’s going on in their life. No matter how close you are to them, you never know. Because I didn’t, like, tell all my friends that I got a Bible and started reading it. And like you pointed out, for me, I didn’t have people witnessing to me. I didn’t have a church or anything. I just was seeking God on my own and got a Bible and had a random encounter watching TV. And it was nine months after I asked Jesus into my life that I started going to church. And then the radical changes started. But you never know what’s going to happen with someone. Like I said, not a year before I asked Jesus into my life, I was so hostile to Christians. I mean, if I found out you were a Christian… I can remember being at a party, and this is, you know, during my drug use, and there was one girl that said, “I went to church this morning,” and I went off on her so bad, even my friends were like, “Dude, chill out!” It’s like, “No, I will not tolerate this.” And I become a Christian a couple of years later. I mean, you never know what someone is going through. You have to understand that… so someone who is hostile to Christianity, witnessing to them is just going to push them away. Just love on them and be there for them. J. Warner Wallace has a great book, Forensic Faith, that talks about dealing with people in general. That book there is making the case for making the case for Christianity, and there’s some good lessons in there, as far as how he talks about breaking up… He sees people in four different categories. You got category one, someone who’s going to believe, agree with you no matter what. And then category two, that someone’s going to agree with you but would be open to listening to the other side. And then category three is someone who disagrees with you but is open to hearing your point of view. And then category four is someone who disagrees with you and is not open to hearing your point of view. And he says, category four, he doesn’t even try having conversations with them. And he still prays for them, and he still believes for them, but until they move into that category three, it’s going to be a pointless or a fruitless conversation, generally speaking. And again, going back to what Greg Koukl said, there are those times that it’s like a Spirit of God, like the Spirit is leading and you have to follow it because something radical is fixing to happen. But generally speaking, we’ve got to use wisdom. We got to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. Yes, that’s excellent advice. For the Christian that has skeptics in their life, read books by William Lane Craig. Read books by J. Warner Wallace. Read books by C.S. Lewis. Get your mind thinking about some of those arguments that you could just bring up in a conversation. I remember a conversation we had with my brother, and we were having breakfast before an event, and we got on the topic of morality, and it just naturally came into the whole moral argument for the existence of God. It wasn’t forced or anything like that, and it was just one of those things, where even he was like, “Yeah, I’m a hypocrite. I’ll have to think about that.” Yeah. You put a stone in his shoe, right?  Exactly. And Tactics by Greg Koukl is probably one of the best books to read, because it’s about how to have that conversation. That’s really excellent advice. Anything else that we may have forgotten or that you wanted to add in this conversation? Or are we good?  I think we covered the gamut on this one. Okay. Good. No. That’s great.  I appreciate you having me on here. This has been a pleasure. It’s a total pleasure to really bring your story forward, Mark. It’s remarkable in so many ways. I think you have said it many times through our conversation is that you just can’t give up. You never know. No matter how far someone may seem and how far someone [may seem and may are 1:07:56] may be from God, you never know that they may be turning in the direction of God, and you just don’t give up hope or give up prayer. And you’re a living example of that.  No. The other thing that’s just coming immediately to mind right now is, I mean, it may even be a last-minute thing. Look at the two thieves on the cross. They both were, according to the gospels, they both were ridiculing Jesus. And then one of them was like, “Wait a minute. He doesn’t deserve to be here.” And he turns to Jesus and he says, “Remember me when you get there.” And Jesus turns to him and says, “I give you my word. Tonight you will be with me in paradise.” I mean, that was like the gospel right there. He didn’t have time to show fruits of righteousness, but he was still accepted. And according to those words, the way I read it, he was saved right there. Right, right. Yeah. No. We should never give up. God never gives up on us.  Right. Absolutely. But, thank you, Mark, so much for coming on. You have an extraordinary story, and it’s been such a privilege to hear such a dramatic transformation in life. I know, just for our listeners, there is a blog that you write. Is there a way that they can follow you on social media? Can you tell us-  Yeah. So I’m on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. If you follow me on Facebook, you’ll probably get spammed with a bunch of memes. But I also do have a blog. It’s called Cyber Penance, and I’ve sent you the link to it, so you can link it below. And, yeah, I should update that blog more often, but I’ve been having a lot of time just spending my morning devotions reading some great books and getting carried away with that and not working on the blog as often as I should. That’s not such a bad thing either.  No. But it has truly, truly been a pleasure having this conversation, and thank you so much for your time and having me on. Yeah. This is terrific, Mark. Thank you again.  You can find out more about Mark and where you can follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Cyber Penance blog in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website at sidebstories.com. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. Again, we welcome your thoughts about this episode and our podcast on our Side B Stories Facebook page. In the meantime, we’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Former atheist Kim Endraske believed in science and her own morality instead of God, yet she lived with a constant fear of moral failure and death. After her views were challenged by an intelligent Christian, she found belief and grace in God. Kim’s Resources: Book: God is Real: The Eyewitness Testimony of a Former Atheist www.amazon.com/dp/1975916328 YouTube Channel: www.YouTube.com/c/FormerAtheist58 Blog: www.TeachWhatIsGood.com Ministry to Families Continuing their Pregnancy to Term: www.AChildOfPromise.org Resources recommended by Kim: More Than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website, sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page.  It has been said that there are two things in life that we can be certain of: Death and taxes. As much as we try to avoid one or both of those things, they are inescapable. For the atheist, death is the end of our physical existence. There is no soul or spirit that exists beyond the grave, beyond death, only memories that live on in the lives of those whom they’ve left behind. If that is true, there should be nothing to fear in death, for we will all experience that. And, for many, that becomes a mandate to make the best of our time here now, to live life to its fullest, to accomplish, to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Or perhaps we just mindlessly pursue distractions and pleasures to avoid the inevitable.  Yet for others, the fear of death can become overwhelming, even for those who don’t believe in God, immortality, and the afterlife. The fear of eternal nothingness, of blackness, can cause a fear in life of the unknown, of what will happen next, of when and whether death is coming sooner or later.  In today’s story, former atheist Kim seriously wrestled with this existential reality. Fear of death was her constant companion. But that fear wasn’t enough for her to change her mind about God just to soothe a personal discomfort. After all, atheists are the adults in the room, called to soberly and courageously live with realities such as death and dying that may be personally unsettling. They are not to succumb to the childish notions of happily ever after in the afterlife. What was it then that changed Kim’s mind about the reality of God, and through that, lose her fear of death? I hope you’ll come along to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Kim. It’s so great to have you with me today.  Thanks. It’s good to be here. Wonderful! As we’re getting started, so that the listeners can know a little bit about you before we get into your story, tell me something about you, perhaps your family, where you live, what you do.  Yeah. My name is Kim Endraske. I am a home schooling mom for 21 years, but in addition to that, I have a YouTube channel at FormerAtheist58 and love to kind of share with people on my YouTube channel. I have a blog at Teach What Is Good, and I’ve always liked to write ever since I was a little girl. Actually, when I was little, I would make little newsletters and sell them to my neighbors, like a quarter apiece or something. And God has just continued that in my life, where now I’ve written several books, and I like to blog, and I’m just a teacher at heart. That’s wonderful! The world is desperate for good teachers. And good writers for that matter. And so for all of our listeners, we’ll include all of these, her YouTube channel, her blog, and all of these connections to you. We’ll put those in the episode notes, so that they can access some of your writing as well and be taught, hopefully, in some way.  Thanks. So let’s get into your story, Kim. Why don’t you talk with me about your upbringing? Tell me a little bit about how and where you were raised and whether religion was any part of your family life at all.  Yeah. So I was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. I’m the younger of two girls. I have an older sister who is three years older than me. My dad and my grandfather are both attorneys, lawyers, and my mom was actually my dad’s legal assistant. So I grew up in a very academic home. Our dinner table conversations usually consisted of whatever case that my parents were working on. And so that was always—we just had a very academically rigorous upbringing. My parents had very high expectations for my sister and I. We were both identified talented and gifted, like, from the earliest age. My sister actually skipped a grade in kindergarten, and I skipped a grade when I was in fourth grade, actually. I took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and scored all 99s on it, and they were like, “Okay, something is going on here,” and so I was actually promoted mid-year when I was in fourth grade, from fourth to fifth. But that’s just a little taste of the academic rigor, that there was just an expectation that I was supposed to be the best student in class. I was always reading books. I would prefer reading over playing outside or over watching TV. I’ve always just kind of been a book lover. And I think that that impacted all of my life, that I wanted to know, I wanted to learn. I wanted to be the smartest, the best, the brightest, be looked up to for my academic excellence. So as far as where religion fits in all of that, well, I don’t remember too much when I was five, but my mom tells me that I told my grandmother when I was five that there was no God. So to me, that means that must have been in there from very early childhood, that I had made up in my own mind that God did not exist. And I don’t think my parents told me God doesn’t exist. I think it’s more just God was absent. You know, there was no faith in my home. We didn’t go to church together. We didn’t pray. We didn’t read the Bible. We didn’t follow any other religions, either. It was just we did things our own way. We made up our own rules, and I think that I liked making up rules. Jana, I’ve always been somebody who likes making up rules. I’ve always been a rule follower, and I liked making up rules, and I liked making up rules for myself. And so I think that’s an interesting little piece of me. I think sometimes people have false conceptions about atheists, that they’re all, like, immoral, into drugs and alcohol and just off the charts. And that was not at all who I was. I was a very good, law-abiding citizen, and I was trying to be good. There was no end goal. I didn’t believe in any kind of afterlife or any kind of spiritual anything. And so it was just about me. And so I wanted to be a good person just for me. And I wanted to help other people because it made me feel good. It made my life mean something to help other people. Right, right, and I can imagine growing up in a home like that, where you’re probably having pretty meaningful discussions around the table. With an attorney and a paralegal as parents, you’re learning about what’s according to the law, what’s breaking the law, so I would imagine you would have this sense, real sense, of right and wrong. Like, some things are law abiding, some things are just what you do, and some things are just what you don’t do, whether God’s in the picture or not. That was probably just the flavor of your home, to grow up with a framework like that.  And I’m so glad, too, that you pointed out that there are so many misconceptions and stereotypes, whether it’s Christian or atheist, that they’re all just a certain way. And I think it’s important that you brought that up, that we don’t broad brush anyone. I think everyone is an individual, and some of the atheists who are friends of mine are some of the most moral people that I know. So it’s not that someone cannot be moral or not based upon their religion. It’s the grounding of that morality. But that’s a story for another day, perhaps.  But back to, again, who you are, growing up. So you you’re rule oriented, you’re moral. But I’m so surprised, even at age five, that you had this very stark, kind of pragmatic view that God did not exist. And of course, you were academically minded. You’re telling me that you were growing up in rigorous kind of intellectual study. I’m curious. Did you consider if God did not exist, did you take on any kind of identity? Or what that looked like if God did not exist? What that meant for you in any way?  Yes. So it’s really kind of a harder question than you might think, actually, because for me, it was just a very humanist—is that a good way to put it? It was just humanist, that my life was just centered on human wisdom, human intellect, human science. Like, I wanted to be a scientist. I was going to be a veterinarian, actually. So I was always very science oriented, into evolution. I wanted to be a veterinarian, so I was always studying animals and especially horses. I thought horses were fascinating. And so the evolutionary theory really grounded me that there was no need for God, because the world just kind of evolved. And so this is where I hooked into, “Okay, yeah, so who needs a God?” But there were two specific things where I really thought, “Okay, I don’t know what to do with this.” I didn’t know how to mesh the beauty that I saw in creation and death. These are two things I really wrestled with as an atheist. So when I saw really beautiful, the created—and now I can say created—but the way that the world was and how beautiful it was, I thought, “Wow, how is this possible?” So I can remember two specific times, I just have this memory, and it’s like a vision burned into my mind. I was in high school. I was at a debate camp. So my sport of choice is I was a debater. So I won speech awards as a debater. I went to Harvard to compete as a debater. When I was in high school, I was a debater. Okay, team policy debate. That was my sword of choice. So I was at debate camp in the state of Vermont, and in between these debate classes that we had, we had a little time, time off, a little break. And I was sitting out in this grassy field, and this blue sky and these trees, and I’m sitting there and I’m watching all of this, and in my head I’m like, “God, if you are real, will you please show yourself to me?” Because I just thought, “How is this possible?” But then Nothing happened. Like there wasn’t lightning or like a Bible fell on me or like somebody walked… Right? Like, no one walked up to me at that moment and said, “Jesus is God!” And so I was like, “Okay, well, I guess God’s not real,” but I actually think that in the creation of what God had made, He was saying to me, “I am real.” He had put into my heart a desire to search for Him, even in that moment. The other thing that I struggled with was death. So I had an ongoing, constant fear of death. I think un-normal. I have four children of my own. None of my children are living in fear of death. So like I said, I was a very moral person, and I think one big reason why I was very moral is I lived in constant fear that I would die. So I wanted to wear a seatbelt, I didn’t want to speed, I didn’t want to use drugs, I didn’t want to drink alcohol, because I lived always thinking, “Oh, I might die! I might die!” And when you died, then that was it. There was nothing after that, and so I didn’t want to die, so I didn’t want to do any of these things. And that also made me think, “Okay, is this really all that life is?” Like, “Is this really it?” Death was also a struggle for me. Okay. Yeah. And those are very real issues of beauty and death, and of course, you as the atheist humanist have to look at life through a stark lens. Like you say, death is all there is. When you look at the diversity and beauty in the world, it really is a little bit hard to explain. I know that there are atheists who look at the cosmos and call it magical because it’s awe inspiring and it’s hard to dismiss that. But at this point you had intellectually dismissed God. Now, you had a moment there where you were wavering, but I’m curious just…. Before we go there, what did you think of Christians or Christianity or belief in God at this point? That it was just subpar intellectually? That it’s just some wishful thinking or fairy tale? Give us what you were thinking around that time and why it wasn’t an intellectually viable option for you.  Okay, so that’s a great question, Jana. I had some Christian friends, friends that referred to themselves as Christians, in middle school, high school, college, people calling themselves Christians. I remember having friends invite me to youth group, and I said, “What is youth group?” because this is like Christian-speak. I didn’t know what youth group was. So they were like, “Oh, it’s when people from our church get together, and we talk about God and stuff.” And I was like, “Well, no, I don’t want to do that.” I wasn’t interested in that. But a lot of it was because the morality that I was keeping was actually superior to the morality that my friends were keeping, right? And so I remember having this friend who was involved with her boyfriend in an immoral way, and she was a Christian and she would say, “Well, God will forgive me,” and that was like what she would say. And I just thought, “Well, if that’s Christianity, I don’t like that.” Now, keep in mind, to me…. Okay, so one is the Christians that I knew, unfortunately, they just did not really… they were not holding to their convictions. So they would say, “I believe this,” but they weren’t really doing it. But there was the occasional Christian that wasn’t like that and that was really appealing to me. So as an atheist, there were these couple Christians that I knew, and now looking back, I wish that I could get in touch with them again and be like, “You were a good example for me!” But people who cared about me and who wanted me to know God. But the other piece of it was I was largely ignorant, okay? So I think sometimes Christians think that atheists know more than they do. And I understand that some atheists have really researched, and they know all about Christianity, and they’ve read the whole Bible, and they have chosen to reject the actual tenets of Christianity that they have read and studied and read the Bible, and they have chosen to reject it. But I think that a lot of atheists, including myself, were like straw man argument, okay? So we have this illusion of what Christians are, and we are rejecting that. So I was rejecting Christians, okay? I was rejecting a faith in an unknown God because I couldn’t see Him, touch Him, feel Him. But I really didn’t know Christianity as far as the gospel, and we’ll get to that in a little bit. But the things that I knew: When I was in college, we took kind of a comparative religion class, and I thought, “Okay, I’m going to choose a religion. So Jews have the law, right? And they like….” Okay, so what I knew, what I understood was: There’s the Ten Commandments. You keep these laws and that kind of stuff. I thought, “Oh, well, that sounds kind of good. A religion where you keep laws, that sounded good to me.” Or other kinds of religions where they were very…. Rule-based faiths sounded more appealing to me than what I knew about Christianity. But, once again, a lot of it was ignorance. And if there is one thing that I really hope that some people will understand, it’s that sometimes you’re rejecting something that you have not really studied and learned about and that you really know what it is that the person actually believes. And not just, “Oh, well, I met this Muslim guy this one time, and I didn’t like him, so I don’t want to be a Muslim.” I met Christians, and I didn’t like some of them. Therefore, I didn’t want to be a Christian. And in my growing up, at that time, most of what I was exposed to would have been Christianity. I didn’t really know a lot of other tenets of faith, but that’s another little piece of my story if you want to hear about that. I don’t know. Sure, sure.  So I skipped a grade, I shared that, I skipped a grade. I became a complete social outcast, right? Because my fourth grade friends wanted nothing to do with me, and the fifth graders wanted nothing to do with me. So I was just a complete social outcast, and so who welcomed me in but this little group of refugee immigrants from Asia. Okay? So one from Thailand, one from Vietnam, and one who was Muslim. I’m not sure where in the Middle East she was from. But those were who became my friends. But they weren’t really trying to convert me, either. They weren’t telling me about their faith, you know? So it would have been interesting if they had, if they had started telling me about their faith. I don’t know. But they really didn’t. When I was in college, my roommate was Mormon. Once again, I liked her because she kept lots of rules, and I liked that. That was really appealing to me. But didn’t try to convert me. I think I’m kind of…. Maybe this is a stereotype of atheists. I’m kind of out there, Jana. I kind of speak my mind, and I’m kind of scary sometimes. Even with Christians, I can be kind of scary and intimidating because I know how to steer a conversation. So I would steer a conversation to where I wanted to talk about, right? So when I was in college and I would have conversations with people that were professing Christians, and I would steer the conversation to whatever topic it was that I wanted to talk about. So, for example, maybe I wanted to talk about how ridiculous it was to believe that the Bible is God’s word, okay? And so I would just start on… it would be like a talking point, and I would just, “Well, how can you believe that the Bible is God’s word? Do you have any proof? How do you know that?” You know. And they didn’t know how to answer me, you know? Or, “What proof do you have that God created the world? What proof do you have of that? Were you there? How do you know?” right? And then they would just kind of be stumped. So, likewise, I think a lot of times people didn’t really try and share stuff with me because I wasn’t comfortable talking about that thing, and I would just steer it to talk about whatever it was I wanted to talk about, and then I would dominate the conversation. And there I was. That’s where we went. Yeah. So it sounds like, then, you had really a picture of Christians and Christianity. Not only were they hypocritical, it was not attractive to you because they weren’t following the rules, although a few were, I guess a few were, but it was more the exception. And then they didn’t seem to be able to intellectually stand on their own two feet. It sounds like, when you were challenging them with their own worldview, they didn’t seem to be able to stand toe to toe with you or engage in a meaningfully intellectual way. So you didn’t have respect, it sounds like, morally or intellectually for the Christian, but it is interesting that you were surrounded by a lot of different people from a lot of different faiths, and really it sounds like only the Christians, at some times, engaged you in conversation, and then that was seemingly impotent. So your view of religion at this point, it sounds like, continues to fail, or meet your expectations for failure, in a sense, as an atheist. But yet you spoke of coming upon a moment in your life where you were overwhelmed by the beauty and the grandiosity of what you were experiencing as you were looking into the world and seeing the beauty. And so much so that you actually were willing to say, “God, if you exist.…” Now, that’s a little bit stunning admission, considering you were seemingly in control of the conversation and in control of your life, but yet you had, like you said, these two vulnerabilities, kind of two-sided coin of death and beauty. But God didn’t seem to answer in the way that you wanted when you were vulnerable in that moment. And I presume that that was a very sincere request of God, right? That you were open at that moment, but He didn’t answer in the way that you had hoped. So what happened there? Did you just close the door again and move on? Or were these two things, death and beauty, just kind of underlying tensions, causing some kind of dissonance in you that wanted an answer?  Yeah. I think they were ongoing tensions for me. But as far as that moment, in Vermont on the grassy field and all of that, I do, I kind of think in that moment, it was almost like, “See, I gave you an opportunity.” You know? It was encouraging me to close the door once again on God and be like…. Because I know that at that camp there were some Christians at that camp, and probably they were trying to engage me, and I was closing them off, and I was kind of like, “Okay, God, I’ll open the door. You get two minutes right now, and You could do something,” but you know, really, my heart was hard. I wish that I could say I was as open minded. I think that I would have called myself open minded. You know, Jana? I would have said, “Oh, I’m open minded. If you can prove it to me, I will believe it,” but I really wasn’t open minded. I really had already made up my mind. I was an atheist, and I had made up my mind about that, and I had told everybody. And I mean, it’s kind of funny, actually, after the fact, a couple of friends who have found out that I’m a Christian, they are like, “What?” They can’t believe it because I was pretty out there. I was an outspoken atheist. Now I call myself… I was an evangelical atheist. I was trying to convert people to be atheists. I wasn’t just a closet atheist. I was an outspoken atheist. And so to leave that identity is like my identity was in being me, so to be humble for that moment and be like, “Okay, God, if You’re real, show Yourself to me,” and then He doesn’t do it, then it was like, “Okay.” I would love to share one other little piece of my story, and that is an experience that I had ongoing with C.S. Lewis. So when I was a kid, my grandparents gave me The Chronicles of Narnia series, and it was my most favorite series, and I read it over and over and over again. And when I was in high school, we had to choose our favorite author and write a paper about them. And now, I haven’t told any of you how old I am, but when I was a kid, I was younger than the Internet, so I had to research things, like in a library, right? I had to go to the library and do research. So I put it off to the weekend before this paper is due, and I go to the library to research C.S. Lewis, and I’m like, “Oh, no! This man used to be an atheist, and he converted to be a Christian. What am I going to do? And I chose him to be my favorite author. This is terrible!” I presume in reading the Narnia series over and over, The Chronicles of Narnia, you didn’t have the sensibility of who Aslan was and the redemption story or any of that?  Right. Right. And now when I read it, I’m reading it going, “Oh, oh, it’s so beautiful! It’s such a beautiful story!” But it’s beautiful to anyone, whether you know God or you don’t know God. It’s a beautiful story of redemption. It rings in your heart. I mean, all of them, The Last Battle, Silver Chair, I mean, there’s so much beauty in all of them. Not just The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And so when I wrote this paper, I left out huge segments of his life. I imagine so.  I was not the most honest person. With these rules that I made up, honesty was kind of honesty as far as no one was hurt and I wasn’t plagiarizing and I wasn’t lying. I was just leaving out huge portions of his life. So I would just say certain little things. But it’s funny how now you can look back and see different ways, different little things, little seeds that were being planted in my life in different points in time, where here was a man who had been an atheist and who had converted to believe in God. And so when I became a Christian, then I have…. I mean, I’m reading Mere Christianity right now. I mean, it’s just there are so many things that C.S. Lewis has touched my life, so just a little aside for- Yes, yes, yeah.  I don’t know. Little catalysts. Catalysts that made you think, “Okay, is God real?” This is a person that I admire, right? I liked writing. I admired him as an author, and this was a man who had converted, and he was a wise man, and he had converted. And it made me think, “Hmm. Maybe this is something I should think about.” Right. I guess you hadn’t read book one of Mere Christianity. Since you were such a moral person, the first few pages of Mere Christianity would have really caused you a little bit of tension, I think.  Now, I did buy a copy of Screwtape Letters. Now, I was at a public library, and they were having a book sale, and I… “Oh, look! This is by C.S. Lewis!” Now, this was before I wrote the paper about him, and I didn’t know what it was about and anyway. So I picked up a copy of Screwtape Letters, but I thought, “This is really strange,” and I never read it, but now I’ve read it a couple of times, and it’s good. That’s interesting that you picked up Screwtape Letters, but it didn’t make much sense to you. C.S. Lewis was and is just an extraordinary writer and thinker, former atheist, as you said, but it is also quite interesting that there were dots and pointers, like you say, towards the transcendent, as he would probably advocate that even his work was one of those pointers towards the transcendent.  So then pick us back up with your story. You had read…. You almost felt betrayed by the fact that you found out that C.S. Lewis was an atheist and now a Christian.  Right. Did you ever come to a place, since you were such a moral person, that there had to be some kind of a transcendent grounding for objective morality? Or did that play at all in your line of thinking or openness towards God?  No. Honestly, I can’t say that that ever occurred to me. It seemed like a social construct. It seemed just like humanism of… we make laws, keeping in mind once again, my dad’s a lawyer, my grandfather is a lawyer. We have these laws for the social good, and I should do these good things because it’s good for society. My parents are very generous people. They want to help other people. And so I wanted to be good for myself, for my own pride, but also to help my community, to help my society, for the benefit of mankind. Actually, one other little interesting stereotype breaker was that I was an outspoken pro-life person. I took my pro-life signs and went to the… marching at different things. Interesting!  And I think that is interesting, but I was very science based, right? And I had seen pictures of a little ultrasound of a little baby, and I was like, “Well, that is a baby.” So, right and wrong, I’m going to say that you should not kill that because that is a baby. Just like I also was a vegetarian for several years, same kind of time period. I was a vegetarian for several years because I saw animals and I loved animals and I didn’t think we should eat them. And I felt that this was a consistent worldview. These things, there’s no God in this. It’s all science. It is just, “This thing is alive. This thing is alive. We don’t kill them.” So I just… Once again, in my head, now who knows, but in my head, I was making up rules for myself, and I tried to keep them, but at the same time I couldn’t keep them perfectly. Right.  So here’s an example where we start getting a little deeper into my life. So when I was 16, I started dating a guy and fell in love with him, and he was going to be the one, right? But I’m 16, but he’s going to be the one. And so I get intimately involved with him when I’m 16. But I had made this rule for myself that I wasn’t going to be like an immoral floozy, right? So he was just going to be the one. But then, man, we broke up a couple of years later. So then, when I’m like 18, we have a new “the one.” And so I date him all through college and get into an immoral—but in my head moral—monogamous relationship with him for three and a half years. He was going to be the one. But then…. We dated all through college, and we were about to get married. I had wedding invitations. I had my wedding dress. We were going to get married. But he was abusive to me. And, for as smart as I was and how self-confident everyone around me thinks that I am, I’m not, you know? I was that rejected kid. I was the one who really struggled to fit in in a lot of social situations and the idea of breaking up with him… I made these rules for myself, and I didn’t want to have another partner. I wanted to marry him, but I couldn’t marry him. I couldn’t. And everyone was shocked. My parents were shocked. And I broke up with him, and I moved to a new city. I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to student teach my final quarter of college because I needed to get away from him. I didn’t feel safe breaking up with him and staying at college. So right before I moved, I broke up with him, gave him the ring back, broke off the engagement, and I moved to a new city. And this was the rock bottom. For all these other kinds of things, I’d always had some kind of support system, but now I’m in a new city, I’m about to graduate, I don’t know where I’m going to work. My parents, at this point, are living full time in an RV. My sister is living in Colorado. I am in a city where I know no one, and I was at a very, very… the lowest point in my life. So I had been in St. Louis for about two weeks, and I get a call from a girlfriend. And I’m at a school, and I am teaching, and the person on the end of the line is this girlfriend, this Christian girlfriend who I had not wanted to maintain contact with. And she said, “Hey, Kim. I’m getting married tomorrow, and you have to come to my wedding.” And I’m like, “Really?” Once again, I lie on occasion, only just when I needed to for the other person’s best interest. I’m like, “Really? I didn’t know,” but the truth is I did know, and I didn’t want to go. I had just broken off the engagement. I did not want to go to this girl’s wedding. But here she is, she’s on the phone!  What am I going to do, right? So I’m like, “Really? Tomorrow? Okay. Yeah!” And I mean I have nothing like, “What am I going to do?” So I’m like, “Okay, I’ll be there.” So I go to the wedding. Do you know where she was getting married? In St. Louis. What are the odds?  I’m from Iowa, okay? I was going to college in Illinois. I am in St. Louis for like twelve weeks to student teach, and she’s getting married in St. Louis. And I’m like, “Okay, well, I guess I have to go, and so I go to this wedding, and I hadn’t RSVP’ed, so I was like, “Okay, I got to go to the wedding, and I got to find somewhere to sit, and so this guy says, “Hey, you can sit at our table.” And so he then became my friend while I was in St. Louis because, like I said, I didn’t know anyone. I had no friends. I am living in a dorm with elementary…. It was a residential school where I was teaching, and so I was living in a dorm with children. And I mean, that’s not who I wanted to hang out with. So I would go spend time with this guy. So he’s a Christian, and he starts talking to me about God, but once again, I would steer the conversation. I would steer the conversation. And so he would tell me about this thing or this thing, or I would ask him questions just to try and show him how foolish he was and Christianity is just a crutch. It’s only for foolish people. But this went on for several weeks, and he kept calling me, which is shocking. I don’t know. I think I would have been like, “Okay, I’m not interested in you anymore.” But he kept calling me, and so, at some point he said this word about, “Well, when people are saved…” So in this moment when he says something about being saved, I’m like, “I’m sorry. What do you mean? What do you mean by saved?” And I heard the gospel. I heard what it meant to be saved. What did he say?  So he’s like, “Oh my goodness! She just asked me what it meant to be saved!” And he’s like, “Well, so you have to admit that you’re a sinner, that you’re bad, that you’ve done bad things, that you have broken God’s commands. And that Jesus is God, and that Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for all of those sins, and that, if you put your trust in Jesus, that He died for you for your sins, that Jesus pays for that.” And I’m like, “Jesus is God?” This is just to show how ignorant I was. But Jana, I didn’t know that Jesus was God. How do I not know this? I grew up in America, but I didn’t know Jesus was God and that Jesus died on the cross for me. I was like, “Okay.” So I’m like, “Okay, God, if this is real… like, I want to believe this. I want to believe that this is real. Will you please help me? Help me to believe that this is real. I want to be saved. I want to believe in You. I want to trust You.” But it’s hard. It’s hard to go from unbelief to belief. And yet when I’m praying, I’m like, “Okay, help my unbelief.” That kind of like, “I want to believe. Help me to believe this,” and so I believe that in that moment, that was the beginning of God beginning a work in me. So, just to be clear, again, to go from a space of adamant unbelief. You hear the gospel. You’re willing to say, “God, if you’re real,” again, one of those, except very heartfelt again. It sounds like there was something very attractive about whatever being saved was. I imagine, again, as a very moral person, you’re always trying to live up to a certain standard of performance. There’s always—inevitably, because we’re all fallen—there’s always a disappointment, always a failure, always never enough in our own sense. So there must have been something very appealing to you about this gospel message.  Yes, Jana. Because, for as much as I was making up my own rules, not rules God made, rules Kim made, I couldn’t keep my own rules. Do you hear me? Right.  I couldn’t keep my own rules. And these were rules that I was making for myself, but I couldn’t keep them. So the idea that I was a sinner, that even in keeping my own rules, whether these were God’s rules or my rules, I recognized that I didn’t want to lie, but I did lie. Right? I wanted to only be with the one person that I married. But that didn’t work out, you know? I knew that I had done things that were wrong, by God’s standards or my own standards. I knew that I had done things that were wrong. I knew that. So then the idea that God Himself would take on human flesh and walk among men and then die for me, for the sins of the world, it was the best news I’d ever heard. I couldn’t believe that I was 21 years old and this is the first time that I’d ever heard or understood that. And it’s hard, I have to almost say heard and understood, because at some level I’m sure that, at some level, I had heard things about this. But I don’t think it was clearly and personally… I know it was never personally to me expressed, right? Maybe in a comparative religion class, maybe an Easter service while I’m doodling or sleeping on my grandma’s lap. But personally, one on one, I know that none of my friends have ever explained this basic “the gospel.” Why was I converted? I heard the gospel. So obviously, again, it was something so appealing and so attractive. But as a thinker and intellectual, you were going, “Well, so how do I know that God exists? How do I know that Jesus is God? How do I know that this isn’t just a fairy tale story to make me feel better?” Were any of those thoughts going through your head? Or was it, “This just sounds so amazing! I really want this to be true.”  Okay, so both/and, right? So, “This is so amazing! I really want this to be true,” right? “But how can this be true? This can’t be true.” So like I said, it is a, “God, if this is real, please help me to believe that this is real.” So after this, Bill gives me a Bible, and I kind of start reading the Bible. Now, before I had a Bible in my home, and I had read some of Genesis up through about Noah where I stopped, and I thought this was just craziness, and I don’t know how anyone could believe that, and that was the end of me reading the Bible. I’d never read Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. In fact, a little piece of my ignorance is that I remember, after becoming a Christian, after praying and wanting to be born again or wanting to believe that God is real, that someone said you should read the book of John. And I was like, “Okay, well, where do I get that book?” Because I didn’t know that the book of John was actually a part of the Bible, so I really didn’t know these things. And so I started reading, with some direction of, “Hey, read the book of John,” right? So my first step was: Maybe I should read the Bible. I know that, for some people, obviously how can you reject something that you’ve never known? But a lot of people reject things that they don’t know. I didn’t really know what I was rejecting. I was rejecting it because I was rejecting it. And so I started reading the Bible with an open mind. And as I’m reading this, now this is at some level Christian speak, okay? So I will try to say it in a way that anyone can understand. Like, before when I would read it, I didn’t have God, the Holy Spirit, living in me and giving me wisdom. And after I prayed this, I truly believe that the Holy Spirit came and changed my heart and I started reading the Bible. It was the most obvious evidence to me that something life transforming had happened in my life in that day, in April 1994. I had been changed. And I start reading the Bible, and I’m like, “This is real.” Like, “This is true.” “Oh, my goodness! This is amazing! This is so amazing!” And I’m reading the Bible, like, “This is not just a book. It’s not just a fairy tale,” like, “This is really the word of God.” And so, at some level, it’s the good news of the gospel, and I was changed, but I also wanted answers to my questions. Like, “Okay, is my faith reasonable? Is there evidence that proves that the Bible is provable and believable and it’s not just pie in the sky faith and nothingness?” But, in addition to all of that…. So for some people, their struggle is to believe that God is good, or their struggle is to resist sin, or their struggle is—we all have kind of different struggles as a Christian, putting your faith in something. And for me, my struggle was just to believe that God was real. I don’t know how to express this. It’s hard to express it unless you have been an atheist. Like there are still moments where it’s this struggle of like, “Okay, so is God real? Is God real, or am I just believing in a fairy tale?” And that was still a struggle. And so after becoming a professing Christian and saying, “I believe in this,” unfortunately, life did not get easy. There have been many difficult marriage struggles. My second child passed away after finding out in utero that he had a fatal condition. We attempted in utero surgery, and he passed away. We then adopted a child. There have been terrible tragedies that have happened in my life, but in all of these little things, it is like God is real, and that helps me to believe that God is real. Yeah. That’s quite a testimony, really. When you’re looking for someone Who is real, not just true, but a God Who is actually there, and a God Who is there for you personally. And then I imagine that, as your belief was becoming more foundational, your periods of unbelief were perhaps leaving, and your periods of belief were becoming more and more firm. I would imagine, after embracing God as real, then you can look at things like beauty and have an explanation for what it is that you see and experience in the world. But I would also imagine your question of death would be a very different issue for you now as a Christian, that fear that you once held as someone who didn’t believe in God. How do you perceive issues of death now?  Yeah. It’s funny. The song that pops into my head is, “O, death, where is your sting?” Right? So when God told Adam and Eve that they had to leave the garden and that they couldn’t eat from that tree of life anymore and that we would die, did you know that in the Christian mindset, this is actually good, because death now means being ushered into eternity in heaven with God. For the Christian, death is the end of this hard, hard life that we have lived on Earth. And it’s the beginning of, like. I will see my little baby boy again. But I’ll see Jesus Who died for me, even more than I will see my loved ones. The idea that I will see my Savior. And the idea that God does not hold against me those years of being a blasphemer and that I can be forgiven, truly forgiven, of who I was and be welcomed in with open arms to eternity. I mean, this is good news. You know? I heard this once, and I thought it was so earth shattering, the idea that Earth is the closest to hell that I as a Christian will ever get, but Earth is the closest to God that those that don’t know Jesus, those that reject Jesus…. Earth is the closest that they will ever get to God. Because here on Earth, there is still some goodness here on Earth in a way that, eternity apart from God, there is no more of God’s goodness left once you choose to continue in your sin and to have heard clearly—any of you that are listening to this, you have heard clearly the gospel, you have, and you can make the choice to turn away from your sins and to turn to God. He offers that to you. He offers it to me freely. And I’m not the same person that I once was. I have hope. I have joy. I have peace in a way that I can now go through these trials. They are still hard. I don’t like them. But I can have joy now in Jesus, in knowing that this world isn’t all that there is. Right. Yeah. And as you say, God is, in a sense, home, where you’re fully known and fully loved and fully accepted and fully belong, and all those reasons why we want to look even beyond death towards what’s to come.  Kim, what a beautiful story of transformation! It just strikes me as someone who was so resistant. You know, the evangelical atheist who is now the evangelical Christian! It’s so obvious to me that your heart is for others to know what you know and to experience what you experienced, because you’ve obviously found something so good and true and life giving. For those who are skeptical and who may be listening, who perhaps have that moment of open vulnerability or humility or whatever it is that might want to call out to God and say, “God, are You real?” There’s something there that they’re curious about. What would you say to the skeptic who might be curious?  Gosh, I have so much I want to say. So, one being don’t be afraid. I think, at some level, there is fear of that unknown God, right? Don’t be afraid to put your trust in something that you can’t see. It will…. Not it, God. God is good. And even the fact that you are questioning or that you’re seeking, at some level that communicates that God is real and that God is prompting you and encouraging you and drawing you. And also, I would say seek. I think sometimes we just…. We…. Me, okay? Me, atheist. Why wasn’t I seeking? I mean, this is the most important decision in your life. It’s the most important decision in your life. And not to put it off. I guess, you know, maybe at some level I was like, “Oh, I’m still young, and maybe I’ll look at that some other time,” but you’re not guaranteed tomorrow. So to really seek. I found Josh McDowell’s books really helpful. More Than a Carpenter, I think, is a fantastic book. I think Mere Christianity is a fantastic book. And at some level, just that you’re even listening to this, that’s awesome. Like, keep seeking. God wants you to know Him. God created people for good, and He wants people to know Him. So reach out to Him. Yeah, I think that’s really great advice. It makes me think, too, of what you were saying before in your story, that you really didn’t even know what you were rejecting. You were just rejecting God and Christianity out of hand and for some reason, but not thoroughly investigated or intentionally sought out reasons, you know? They were just presumed. And I think sometimes, if you’re willing to seek, like you say, just to seek honestly, that you’ll find, probably a lot more than you thought was there.  For Christians who might be listening, and like you say, you’re an evangelical Christian now who wants others to know God. There are so many Christians who are listening, who have people in their lives, who don’t know God or are rejecting God on some level and rejecting Christ and Christianity. How would you encourage Christians to best engage, perhaps with a life that is not hypocritical or that they know why they believe, not just that they believe, so that they can give answers, unlike those who were not able to answer you when you were younger. What would you encourage the Christian to do or be or think in order to be more effective in the way that they engage others?  Okay, so there’s a couple things: One is always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in you and do it with gentleness and respect. So be prepared that the person that you’re talking to might control the conversation, be angry, all of that, but you have to be able to continue to be gentle and respectful and avoid arrogance. Humility is so attractive, and unfortunately, I’m afraid that so many Christians, they can become prideful and arrogant in their knowing the truth, rather than being humble in knowing the truth. So encouragement to be humble. But also to always be prepared to give a reason. So to be able to share the gospel quickly, concisely. I can share the gospel in a nutshell in one to three minutes. I can share in one minute that Jesus Christ was God’s only son, that He came to earth. He lived a perfect and sinless life. He did all kinds of miracles to prove that He really was God in the flesh. He died on the cross to pay the punishment for our sins. All of those wrong things that we have done, all of those things that we have done against God’s laws, He took those upon Himself on the cross, paying for our sins. And He rose from the dead after three days, proving again that He is God, and triumphing over sin and death. And now Jesus reigns from on high. And you can trust in God and turn away from your sin today. What is preventing you? What is stopping you? What concerns do you have in putting your trust in Jesus? And then be prepared to hear what they have to say. There might be some stumbling block that they have. Not everyone is going to be like me and be like, “That’s the best news I’ve ever heard! I want to believe!” If they have a struggle, then go with them, like Bill, who continued to stay with me and stay with me and stay with me. Walk the journey with them. Read the Bible with them if they’re willing. Recommend some good Christian literature to them. And stay with them in whatever it is that they’re wrestling with. Yeah. So share the gospel. Be humble. Yeah. I think what you say is really spot on, and I think that…. Gospel means “good news,” and it was good news for you because it means that you didn’t have to perform. None of us have to perform because we’re none of us good enough, right? So the idea of having grace laid upon you, that you don’t have to be good enough, that God has done that for you, that is tremendously good news, and it would be good news for anyone who wants to hear it.  So thank you. You really are the consummate teacher, I think. And it’s obvious to me that you have spent a lot of your life communicating ideas and that it’s not just from your head and the logical aspect of you, but really you have such a passion for what you believe to be true and real. And I just appreciate so much, Kim, you coming on with me today, for sharing all that you have in such a transparent and really pragmatic way, that I think that a lot of us need to hear and want to hear at some level. And I pray that really that this conversation is benefit to so many who hear. So thank you for coming on with me today.  You’re welcome. You’re welcome. I hope I can be an encouragement to Christians that don’t have a testimony like mine, that your testimony matters too. You don’t have to have a testimony like me. When Bill shared the gospel with me, his testimony doesn’t look anything like mine, but his testimony and sharing the gospel are what God used to touch me. So you don’t have to have a, “I was an atheist, and now I got saved,” to be able to share the gospel with other people and encourage them in their faith. So thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Oh, you’re so welcome! Thank you again.  Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Kim’s story. You can find out more about her and her story through her book, God is Real: The Eyewitness Testimony of a Former Atheist. She also has a YouTube channel and blog, and I’ll post all of that information and links in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website. Again, that is www.sidebstories.com. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. We would really appreciate it. And again, we welcome your thoughts about this episode and our podcast on our Side B Stories Facebook page. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Claire Dooley left the God of the Jehovah’s Witness religion behind and became an atheist.  After encountering the overwhelming love of Jesus, she came to believe. To learn more about Claire and her film documentaries, go to www.clairedooley.co Hear more stories of atheist conversions to Christianity at www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website, www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well.  People hold a lot of ideas about the Bible from what they’ve heard or presumed. Many skeptics may or may not have personally read it, but they often have strong impressions about it, mostly negative. Considering the Bible in any serious form or positive way was simply out of the question according to many former atheists in my doctoral research. They expressed many reasons to reject the text. It was viewed as a mixture of myth, fabrication, ignorant commentary from bronze-age Jews, a tool that someone had actually crafted to control the population, or a generally non-historical false religious book. Its supernatural content alone caused nearly half to soundly dismiss it. For them, the Bible wasn’t worth taking a first, much less a second look, unless to disprove it.  Interestingly, some who began their quest towards discrediting scripture found themselves in a precarious place of changing their preconceived notions. Once they got around to examining the Bible, many found it to be historically, intellectually, and even morally forceful, with a ring of truth. Although initially hostile to reading the Bible, some were even compelled towards serious, even voracious, reading, surprised by what they had found. Others found the person and words of Jesus as extraordinary and surprising and were personally drawn to Him, wanting to know more.  In today’s story, former atheist Claire Dooley opened the Bible for herself, and she was changed. A storyteller and filmmaker, she was drawn not only to its compelling narrative, a grand love story, but became intrigued by Jesus, the Author and Giver of love Himself. Welcome to Side B Stories podcast, Claire. It’s so great to have you.  Thank you for having me. I really love being here. Wow, that’s wonderful. I’m just so grateful for you being here. Why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are, so they have an idea before we get into your story.  So I am from Mississippi. I currently live in Austin, Texas, and I’ve been making documentary films since I was 19 years old. And you’re 23 now? So for about four years?  I’m 23 now, and yeah, it’s been about four years. I went to college for a year and then left school and was mentored by someone in the industry in New Orleans, and so I kind of skipped, bypassed the whole school process. Tell me about your home and your family growing up. Was there any religion, any kind of faith, anything like that, as you were growing up as a child?  Yeah. So I think I kind of have a weird story. When I tell people my childhood, they’re like, “What?” Like I said, I was raised in Mississippi, and I was home schooled until I was eleven, and now I have six siblings, but at the time, when I was really young, I had three. So my mother was a Jehovah’s Witness. And my dad was not. So my dad had been to church on Easter and Christmas when he was a younger child. But my mom was converted when she was around 19 years old. And so, when we were little, I would literally go door to door preaching the good word to all of these different people. I mean, from a very young age, five years old, knocking on these doors, preaching to people. And then the older I got, the more I realized that something was off, right? My father wasn’t necessarily supportive of my mother’s faith. And she had, they ended up having three more children. So there’s six kids at this point, and she couldn’t continue going to church by herself. So me and my older sister would go a lot. So when I was eleven years old, just to backtrack a bit, we went to public school for the first time. And so that was kind of interesting, being a home schooler, going from this very more sheltered environment to a public school in Mississippi. And so me and my two older siblings, both of us were in school until we graduated after that point. And so it was interesting because I was sitting there and Jehovah’s Witnesses are very rule oriented. There’s not a lot of grace. There’s no acknowledgment of this unconditional love that our Father has for us. It’s talked about on the outside, but on the inside, they don’t really live by that. So if you dress a certain way, if you celebrate holidays, whatever it is, that makes you a worldly person. And so I would be in school and watching all these kids around me, and they’d be celebrating Christmas or even simple things like saying the Pledge of Allegiance. And I constantly felt like an outsider, and I was put in this really unfair predicament, I think, because I’m a young child with all these beliefs that have been thrown on to me. And at the same time I’m put around all these “worldly people” and expected to, as a young person, be completely unwavering in anything, in any of my decisions, right? Especially given that my father was not a Jehovah’s Witness. So he had family Christmas on his side. If I went over to family Christmas, the Jehovah’s Witnesses that I was friends with, the young people I was friends with, would not invite me to things and would basically shun me for doing those things, when it was something I had no control over. And so, as I got older and older, I just remember trying so hard. I remember trying to follow all the rules. I remember trying to be the perfect Christian and get the right amount of hours and service, which is what they call whenever you go door to door and preach. And my older sister and I would go to church by ourselves without our mom. And when she went to college, the woman who was actually hosting the Bible study with her from our church cut her off because she was upset with her for going to college and didn’t help her transition whatsoever. You see that a lot in Jehovah’s Witness’s kind of culture. And so at that point, I just stopped. You were believing up until that point. You believed in God, or at least this Jehovah’s Witness version of God and Jesus. But again, it was very rules oriented, very legalistic. So there were a lot of positives and negatives growing up with this image of God, I guess, in your mind. Through your journey of being a Jehovah’s Witness, who did you perceive God to be? What was their picture of God to you?  So Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t really talk about what we call the Trinity at all. They believe that that is part of “false religion.” And so Jehovah, which is a translation that came about in, I think, the 18th century, late 18th century, would be what we call Yahweh, and so He was God. Jesus had nothing to do with that. Jesus was just a ransom sacrifice. And Jehovah’s Witnesses also teach and for the last century, since 1914, I think, is when they were started, around that point, they’ve taught that Armageddon was coming. It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming. It’s fear, it’s fear, it’s fear. You know, Jesus is going to come back soon. All the world is going to be done away with. And if you’re not a Jehovah’s Witness, you’re going to die. That’s literally what they teach. And so I was always so afraid. I was like, “I’m going to die if I don’t do all these things right. I’m gonna die. And I have to follow each of these rules because that’s how God is. And He expects all this of us. And if I don’t do this, then it’s all on me.” And I wanted nothing to do with that God by the time I turned 16. I had a lot of trauma surrounding that God, because it’s not who I know Him to be now whatsoever. So your sister went off to college. You saw the way that she was, in a way, shunned by the JW community, or her Bible study teacher, and that was, I guess, for you, the last straw, to see the way that she was treated, and was there something about that that you said, “I’ve had enough.”  It wasn’t out of anger as much as it was…. It was more feelings of hopelessness. She’s gone, and the woman was also studying the Bible with me and ended the Bible study with me. So I just felt like I wasn’t important, and I felt like I was a lost cause, like I’d been put on the back burner. And the woman made no arrangements to find someone else to mentor me and be there for me in the spiritual way. And so I just kind of thought, “I can’t do this. I don’t feel capable of doing this.” I could never be good enough for God. And I remember actively breaking down about two years later, because in the back of my mind, I thought He was there. But then again, I just always thought, “No, I could never be good enough for Him. I could never achieve that. I’m just going to die. I’m giving up right now.” And I remember, like, I said this prayer, and it was the last time I prayed for three years. I remember having a conversation like, “God, I’m sorry, but what You ask of me, I just can’t do it. I don’t know how. And You deserve so much. You are such an amazing Creator to do everything you’ve done for us, and I just could never, ever repay You for that. I could never be the person You want me to be.” Because I knew nothing of sanctification. I knew nothing of this grace. And so at that point, I just said goodbye to God, basically, and ventured into being agnostic. And that was around the time that I went off to college. Okay, yeah. So when you went off to college, you left whatever remnants of faith you had behind, and you said you became agnostic. So you were, I guess, in this period of not really sure. You just didn’t want to have anything to do with Jehovah’s Witness and that kind of God. And so okay, so walk us forward then as you entered into this, I presume, again kind of a secular university, that was not JW or anything to do with that?  No. It was a liberal arts college in Mississippi called Millsaps. And so I went there for…. I remember my parents dropping me off and just kind of having this ultimate freedom. And at the time it ended up being a very beautiful thing, but I was dating this guy, and so it did protect me from a lot. But I remember just thinking to myself, “Well, maybe God’s not real. Maybe all of that was in my head and maybe there’s not really a God at all,” because all these things I like to do, everything that I find joyful and pleasurable about entering the world, is the complete opposite of what I think, these people, what they call God, wants. That doesn’t make any sense to me.” So I just kind of thought I might as well just live the most sinful life I can. I didn’t think of it that way, but that was kind of the concept in my moving forward, just, “Yeah, I’m just going to do whatever I want to do because I honestly don’t even think God exists, and I’m just going to completely let go of any kind of sense of moral direction.” And I lived like that, and my whole life, I think because of religion, from around 14 years old, I struggled with depression and anxiety. When I was 14 years old, and this is kind of, I think, a byproduct of the environment I was in, the school I was in, and all these different attacks from Satan that were going on, I struggled with self harming, with withholding food from myself, so eating disorders, and then definitely suicidal thoughts. And so, when I got to college and all that was going on still, but I’m diving deeper and deeper away from the warmth and love of God and completely ignoring that He existed, I definitely began to have suicidal thoughts like I never had. I remember I’d just be driving down the road, and I would just think, like, “I could just push the wheel,” you know, or whatever it was. I remember thinking of ways that I could kill myself without being in pain, because to me the world was just so dark and so terrible, and, “God doesn’t exist and nobody loves me.” And it’s this isolation that you feel when you don’t have Him in your life. And all of those feelings kind of came to a head. And I made this rash, like, completely irrational decision. I’d met this girl one time, at prom my senior year, and it was the end of my freshman year of college, and she was like, “I’m going to go hike this trail in California called the Pacific Crest Trail. Do you want to go?” And I was like, “Yes! I’ll go. Sure.” I’d never been to California. I’d never flown commercially. I didn’t even have the money to do it. I didn’t even know how I was going to pull it off. But I told her I would go with her. And so the last day of school…. Because I was just trying to run away from everything, I was still very atheist. And the last day of school, I remember I was in the basement of the library, and I was walking out, and they were giving…. They give away free books once people don’t check them out for a certain amount of time. They’re like, “Oh, let’s just through these out.” And I saw Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and I thought that it was making fun of Christianity. Interesting.  Yeah. So I took it home, and it just sat there in my room all summer. And then it was time for me to go on this hiking trip. So I had gotten this pack. It was like 40 pounds, and I had stuck it in my backpack right as I was leaving because I realized that I didn’t have anything to entertain myself. So when you’re hiking, you don’t have service, right? So I’m going to be in the middle of nowhere for two weeks, backpacking. So it’s not like…. Everything you need is on your back. So I’d packed so light, as light as I could go, and it was still 40 pounds. And so I realized…. I’m a writer. I love writing, and I didn’t have anything to journal with. I didn’t have anything. So I just saw that, at the time I thought stupid book. I just picked it up and threw it in my bag and went on my merry way. Now, at this point, this is so funny to me, because it’s not as if you were looking for God necessarily. In a way, you were running from God. But you went from one place to the next, which was much darker, but then you grabbed this book, and it’s not as if you were looking for God or praying to God or anything at this point, like, to show you. You just happened to pick up the book Mere Christianity and put it in your backpack. I find that very ironic.  I agree. I had no idea what I was doing. And I thought that was so funny, now, looking back, because I thought it was like some special book, you know, that nobody knew about. So I fly across the country for the first time by myself, and at this point, too, I’m just trying to run away from everything, my family, even college, the idea of college. I mean, it put me in such a dark place, and I had become a fully blown atheist. I’m just curious, at that point, when you had decided to take on the atheist identity, were there other atheists in your world? Were you associating or with other people who believed similarly, like, “Ah, there’s no God?” Or was this kind of an independent road that you were on?  It was a bit of both. I think that, whenever I fully started talking about the fact that I didn’t believe in God and that God didn’t exist, I remember there was someone…. There were a few people that I had spoken to and had conversations with. They kind of tipped me over the edge of from being agnostic to atheist. And just the way they spoke about Old Testament God and different things like that, I think I already had such a horrible idea of who God was from Jehovah’s Witnesses. So whenever I went to college and met people who were also atheist, I already had that in the back of my mind, because I think it was a lot easier to believe that He wasn’t there than to continue living in the grief of knowing that I was going to be obliterated, because that’s what Jehovah’s Witnesses had taught me. So there were some people that I’d met, who I’m not really friends with or was friends with then, but I had conversations and I was like, “Oh, that makes that makes a lot of sense. God probably doesn’t exist.” And I’m pretty sure that the girl I went hiking with at the time didn’t believe in God either. And so there were a lot of people kind of in my circle that, at a liberal arts college, either didn’t talk about their faith, or if they did, they probably were atheist. So I’m sure that influenced me in some way. Yeah.  But I think what really dove me deeper was just the depression that I was experiencing. I was just like, “If there is a God, why would He ever let me or a person suffer like this? He wouldn’t do that. And if He would, I still wouldn’t have anything to do with Him.” Yeah. That’s a very, very difficult thing, trying to understand or make sense of a good God when you’re in a dark place.  Yeah. And so I think that was why that hiking trip was so… I don’t know. At the time, I didn’t realize it, but God was calling me to go. But I kind of saw it as a means of, once again, just escaping everything and doing something that was in my control. I honestly thought that going hiking would fix whatever was going on in my head. And funny, it kind of did. So tell me what happened. How did this work its way out?  So we were actually planning to do a section hike called the John Muir Trail, which goes through Mount Whitney, and it’s just a beautiful 200-mile trail that is the most frequented of the Pacific Crest Trail. So the Pacific Crest Trail runs from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada. And so we were going to do a section hike on the John Muir Trail. I had done all the preparation, I applied for the permits, I had the maps, and I did research on the wildlife and different things to watch out for. And the week before, the California fires had reached that section, and it was blocked off, and we couldn’t hike on it. So I thought to myself, I was like, “Okay, well, we’ll find LA and hike through Angeles National Forest. And what we’ll do is we’ll just go to the ranger station, talk to them, get the maps, and educate ourselves in the area.” Because it was so soon, it seemed like the best option. So I looked at the ranger stations that were open, called to make sure, and then we Ubered all the way to Angeles National Forest, which I think was like an hour. And we get into the park. There’s no service. We get dropped off. And I remember watching the car drive away, and I had no service on my phone. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and I walk up to the door, and it is so closed, like there’s no one there. And there’s just a sign on the door that says, “Caution: Drought in this area.” And I’m just sitting there like, “Okay. All right. I guess I’ll just start.” So I took a picture with my phone of the board that they have kind of outside hiking trails that are super not accurate, and we just started hiking, with no idea what we were doing. And so to kind of summarize, because I don’t want to go too deep into this trip, but a lot of crazy stuff happened. We almost ran out of water several times. We ended up accidentally taking the wrong trail, and it was called High Desert Trail, and it was not maintained. And we’re on the edges of these cliffs, like, trying to get across, then there’s this rattlesnake. And all these things happen, where we had so many near-death experiences, and especially the day that we got stuck on that cliff, we finally make it to the other side, and then there’s a bunch of inmates everywhere cleaning up stuff, and we’re these two young women by ourselves in the middle of nowhere, and we’d taken the wrong trail and had no water. And so all these things were happening, and the kindness of strangers just never failed to amaze me. So I remembered, like, two or three days in, that I had this book. So I remember I walked up to this woman and I was like, “Hey, can I trade you?” I had a dollar or something. And I was like, “Can I buy a pen from you?” She was just some random lady at the park. She was like, “I’ll just give you a pen.” So she gave me a pin. And so I started writing in the pages of the Mere Christianity book. I wasn’t reading it. I was just writing because, once again, I didn’t have to write with, so I was journaling all these things that were happening. And in the process, as I’m journaling, I start catching these lines from CS. Lewis, and I’m like, “What is this guy talking about?” And so I was very confused, because I was like, “Whoa, this is not the Christianity I know at all. Is he making fun of it, or is he agreeing with it? What’s going on here?” So I started reading more and more, and I’m in the elements, right? So I’m going to bed every night not knowing if a bear is going to come tear me apart to steal my food and not knowing if I’m going to find water the next day or not knowing if I hitchhike with someone, if they’re going to kidnap me. And I’m having all of these, to be dramatic, I would say near-death experiences. But I felt like it was that at the time. Exactly. I mean, that was your experience. Yeah.  Right. So many things could have gone wrong. And I remember this one day we had what I call a trail angel come and find us, and we had once again hiked the wrong way. Nothing is going right. And we hitchhiked with this man, and he told us about how we reminded him of when he was younger, and he went on a hiking trip with one of his friends, and they had hitchhiked. And he said that friend had actually just passed away the week before. And so we had this long conversation with him. And I remember he prayed for us. His name was Norm. And I once again remember just thinking, “What are your prayers going to do for me, dude? Just help me find where I’m going.” But the thing about a real Jesus person is that he did. So Norm took us to this fire station, charged our phones, because our phones were almost dead. They resupplied everything. They gave us food and water. And then he went and brought us back onto the trail. He gave us a map and sent us on our way. And everything went smoothly after that for the most part. And later I found out that this man had not only done that, but he went to every stop along the way that we would have passed through and told the people we were coming through and to watch out for us and to let him know if we came through. And if we didn’t come through, he was going to go right through where we were hiking and find us to make sure we were okay. Like, this guy was amazing. Wow! He really was a trail angel. That is amazing!  And I still am in contact with him to this day. And so anyway, so we’re hiking, and we go up this mountain, and I think it was a total of 12 miles in a day. And it’s one of the tallest mountains on the southern side. It’s called Mount Baden-Powell. And so I remember getting to the top of the mountain. The blisters on my feet are just horrendous. My back is aching. My trail partner is literally just face down on the rocks. And I’m sitting there, and it’s just silent. And I’m on top of this mountain. I can see all the way down to LA. I can see miles and miles in every direction. And so I pull out the book and start reading again. And I actually don’t even remember exactly what it was I read, but I remember just thinking, “I can feel God. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know who He is, but something’s going on here, because I should be dead right now.” But I was in denial, right? So I was thinking more along the lines of, like, “Okay, maybe it’s like the universe thing, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, the universe is looking out for me,’ and maybe C.S. Lewis is just talking about the universe, but he’s not talking about God Himself, right?” So it was still an atheist moment, but it was that one little step I needed towards meeting someone who helped us so deeply and courageously. And so I remember thinking, “Well, maybe God exists, but maybe not. Maybe it’s like this universe thing, like maybe there’s some kind of karma thing going on here,” right?  So I leave, and once again, I decided… I did an internship with this show called The HighWire with Del Bigtree. So when I was younger, I always said I wanted to do something with film. I didn’t know what that would be. And at a small business, I did wedding videos in high school and stuff like that. And so I knew that I wanted to run away from everything, and I was seeking fulfillment in the world still. But because of my experience when I was hiking, I realized that a lot of the things we think are problems aren’t actually problems, right? If I know I’m going to have food and water and a roof over my head, I’m good. I really am fine. It’s amazing how things can come into perspective somehow.  So I decided I was either going to transfer to a school that had a film program, because the one I was at didn’t, or drop out and just give it a try. So I settled for somewhere in the middle, and I found this program called Film Connections that connects you with a mentor and has a curriculum and kind of walks you through what it’s like to be a filmmaker. And so I reached out to this mentor, this producer in New Orleans named Ralph Madison, and he was like, “Yeah, we’d love to have you.” and he was nothing like I expected him to be.  He does amazing work. So I expected him to be this stern film guy, and I show up, and he’s kind of this hybrid, right? So he’s into crystals and Reiki, but he calls on the name of Jesus. And I was like, “Whoa! What is going on here?” And it really kind of threw me off, because I’d never known anyone like that, right? So he was into kind of the New Age spiritual stuff, but he still was his own version of a Christian, so he wasn’t in a church, but he would read the Bible. And so that kind of, I think, began to open my mind to things, where I was like, “Well, maybe I can just have my own version of whatever that is,” and blah, blah, blah. But by me leaving college, it began this path where I think it helped me slowly open my mind back up to the fact that there may be a God and that He may exist and that He may love us. And so I was mentored for six months in New Orleans, and he taught me a lot, and he was an amazing, incredible mentor and an amazing person. And I, long story short, ended up getting a job in Austin, Texas, on a documentary. So I’m moving here to work on this documentary, and I met a producer at my friend’s wedding in Austin, and that’s how I got the job. So my friend was leaving Texas, and her family was like, “Well, why don’t you just move in with us since you’re moving?” I was only 19 at the time, and so I moved in with them. And they have the biggest hearts out of anybody I’ve ever met in my life, to this day probably. The most giving, kind people. And so their story is very interesting because they were also atheists before they moved to United States, but their son Billy really loves live music, and there’s a church next door, so they start going to church every week because Billy wanted to go. And Billy is an adult with autism, and they slowly came to terms with who God was and His love. And so they were another example of someone I had met who was atheist and had converted to Christianity. They used to make fun of Christians. They did not like them at all, and then went from that to being big time Bible readers. Their names are Polly and John. What I loved about Polly was that every single morning I would walk into the kitchen, she’s reading the Bible, and every single Sunday, she would say, “Oh, we’re going to church. Do you want to come with us?” And I would always say no. And she would always try to talk. She wouldn’t force it on me, but that’s just how she is. She’ll talk to anybody about Jesus any time, and just includes Him in the conversation, like He’s a friend. And I love that about her. And so I saw her talking about Jesus, but in a way that wasn’t like anything I’d heard. First off, she always said Jesus. She never said God. It was always Jesus. But she would always just talk about His unending love. And she would treat everyone with this intense love and was so giving. And everyone in the neighborhood that she met, who she knew would be in need, they would come every single week and get eggs from our chickens. And if somebody was sick, she would make this beautiful British meal and bring it to their house. Or when I would be going out to the bars with my friends, she would give me cash to make sure that I had money for dinner. They were so giving, and they would make my room up nice whenever I went to travel. They would prepare foods for me. I went through a really terrible breakup at the time, and they would have game nights with me and just support me and surround me in love. And I had never really experienced something like that. I had never been loved like that. And to experience something like that from people who call themselves followers of Christ, I thought, “Maybe not all Christians are bad people, but I still just don’t think this is true.” Like, “Maybe she just sees another side of God, but she’s not talking about the full picture,” because that is what Jehovah Witnesses, kind of that indoctrination I had in the back of my mind still, what they would say. “Oh, the world just condones all sin,” and they’re all what they call Christendom, that they’re part of fake followers of Christ and misleading people by telling them that God loves us unconditionally. And so I think in the back of my mind I thought, “Well, yeah. She just doesn’t have it quite right.” There’s still this part of God that is legalistic and hates us and that kind of thing. And so I think, because of that, and subconsciously, I still was just completely denying that He was there because it was easier to do that. But it was hard to deny the love that you were being constantly shown. Yeah.  Absolutely. I knew there was something to that. And so I got this job in Miami, so I had then, at this point, stayed with them for over a year and just been surrounded by their love. And so then I moved to Miami to work on this documentary, and I am all alone, and this is at the end of 2019, so I didn’t know anyone. I’m working twelve hour days, seven days a week, so I think on Sundays, I would work like a half day, and that would be all my time off. So I had no time to make friends, and then everything locked down. And at this point, once again, I just completely started ignoring any kind of idea that God may exist or the question in my head because I wasn’t around Christian people anymore. And I was very isolated, and… it’s kind of hard to bring this up. Whatever you feel comfortable with or not. No, it’s fine.  No. I was very isolated, and I didn’t really know a lot of people, and so I made some friends from work, and I went out to a bar, and this was about probably two or three weeks before everything locked down in the United States from COVID-19, and I was roofied and sexually assaulted. Oh, I’m so sorry.  It was definitely the darkest moment in my life. And my entire life, I had struggled with anxiety and depression, and so I remember just thinking like, “I don’t want to be here anymore. This is horrible. If this is what the world is, I want nothing to do with this.” And just the amount of deep… It was the most intense pain I had ever felt in my life. I mean, I remember just feeling like I couldn’t breathe and crying on the bathroom floor for days. And I just thought, “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. I really don’t.” It was such a dark moment. And I remember just sitting there, and I prayed for the first time, I think it had been since that last prayer I mentioned. And I just said, “Look, if You’re there, I can’t do this alone. I cannot keep doing this alone.” No. Right.  “I’m literally going to kill myself if You don’t rescue me right now. If You’re there, come and let me know who You are because I can’t do this,” and I have no way to describe it other than I felt all of heaven surrounding me. Oh, my!  Legitimately. I felt His presence so strong in the room, and all of those years of depression and suicidal thoughts and anxiety came crashing down on me at the same time. And it’s the most bizarre thing. I can never describe exactly what it felt like, but I remember just thinking, “There are so many things in my life I’ve ignored. There are so many actions that I’ve taken that have caused me such great pain, and all of them are rooted in what I always thought was sin. And I’m going to acknowledge those things right now, and I’m going to feel it.” And I remember, flooding in my mind, I had memories from when I was really little, all the way up until that moment. Every single thing I’ve been through. Memories from my childhood, memories from my parents’ relationship, from other experiences I’d had, in particular with men abusing me sexually. And so I remember just thinking, like, “I’m going to feel all of this. I’m going to stop ignoring all of this, and I’m going to feel it right now.” And I mourned. I mean, I mourned for a week straight. I’ve never cried so much in my life. I cried every single day, every single moment I stepped through the door after I finished my work, or even sometimes when I just shut the door to the office, when I was leaving, I would just start pouring tears. I was just trying to hold it together to get the work done and then going home and just mourning every single horrible thing that had ever happened to me, including being sexually assaulted. And God said to me, “I’m here and I exist, and I love you.” I didn’t hear his voice, but I felt that very clearly. And so I started this journey where I, once again, wasn’t really sure, wasn’t really sure if it was the Christian God, but I knew God, like there was a God, because I felt its presence in that moment, so clearly. And it pulled me out of these depths at this moment where I was just like, “I can’t do this unless I have You.” And so I started praying for the next few months, but I wouldn’t say a name. I’d always say, “God, show me who You are. Reveal yourself to me. Show me the truth. I want to know who You are. I want to worship You. I want to love You, but I don’t know who You are.” So I was reading books on Buddhism, Hinduism. I mean, I was doing everything. I was looking everywhere I could for the truth. Right.  And I remember I woke up one day and nothing had really worked. I would feel connected to something, I would try it out, and then nothing would happen. And I wouldn’t feel that Presence I felt in that dark moment. I was like, “Where is that Presence?” I’m looking for it everywhere, and I couldn’t find it. “Point me to You.” Yes.  And I picked up the Bible, this old Jehovah’s Witness Bible that I had. So the translation is a bit different. And I just started in Genesis. I just started reading it, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh! This is not what I thought it was at all!” And even like God had opened my eyes, even like the veil had been lifted. And so I’m reading of His love, and I’m reading of creation, and I’m reading of how we were designed to live, and that was exactly what I wanted. And nobody else was talking about that. Other religions deny suffering, whereas God tells us, “You’re going to suffer, and it’s going to suck.” Excuse my language. But it’s going to suck. “But I’m going to be with you,” and that’s the difference, right? Yes.  So I was like, “Oh, so I don’t have to transcend existence and pretend like I’m not suffering in a Buddhist way or whatever,” you know? Right.  I can suffer fully and feel it fully and go through really hard things, and pain is okay because I know where I’m going. I have the hope of salvation. And so when I picked up that Bible, I started reflecting back on John and Polly and their love, and I was like, “That’s what they do.” I was like, “I want some of that. That’s what I want. They’ve got that part figured out. I’m just going to read the Bible and keep on praying.” And so through this really horrible experience of being sexually assaulted, it brought me to this rock bottom moment where I fully turned to God, because there was no way I could do it without Him. And He had built this intricate story line of dropping me bite-sized pieces of love. And so John and Polly, I started calling them, and I told Polly what happened, and I remember she really supported me in that time. And then, after reading the Bible for about six months, I decided I was going to move back to Austin, and I asked her if she would baptize me. And so I went back to Austin. And once again, at this point, I have a lot of religious trauma. So I’m like, “I’m never stepping foot in a church. Not doing it. No way. But I’ll read the Bible and I’ll pray, and that’s good enough for me.” And so I go to Austin, I meet with Polly, and she throws this beautiful party for me. And in that moment, I made clear to everyone that that was the life I wanted to choose for myself. And I kind of always say it was the best day ever. It was the best day ever?  Yeah. It was! So this is just kind of a funny side story. So I love the sun. My mood is very dictated by the weather. And I woke up that morning, and it was cloudy, and I just prayed, and I was like, “God, I’m not trying to be petty right now, but can You please make the sun come out? Because I’m not trying to get baptized in a cloudy day.” And so I was just kind of joking with Him. And that’s what I loved about the new relationship I had with God. It was never like, “Dear Father, blah, blah, blah,” you know? “Forgive me for this, and blah, blah, blah.” It was very personal. I always had conversations with Him and, like, He was a real living, breathing God, because He is. And so I remember saying that. And then as I’m coming out of the water—I have a video of this. The clouds parted, and the sun came out. Wow, what a gift.  And I was like, “This is so cool! You didn’t have to do that!” Celebrating over you, I think, there in that moment. If I could ask a question, you speak of being baptized. Now, the God that you knew as a Jehovah’s Witness. You never thought you could be good enough. No matter what you did or how many doors you knocked on or whatever it is that you had to accomplish. It was just so overwhelming. You just wanted to give it up. Now, when you move to a place where you meet Jesus and you’re ready to get baptized, baptism really symbolizes something very particular. Of course, it’s putting off the old and putting on the new, but there’s a washing away a sense of sin, at least in the Christian way of thinking about things. And I’m wondering, as someone who understood the weight of trying to work your way to God, what it meant for you when you understood what the gospel is and what grace is and those things you said that were missing before that I guess you had found. Can you kind of talk about that a little bit, so people listening can understand that contrast and that transformation?  Yeah. So I remember I started reading the Bible and the God that had been skewed in my mind as a child was not in there. And I remember something that always has stuck with me is Romans 8. That’s my chapter. Anytime I feel lost, go straight to Romans 8 and start reading. And for anyone who doesn’t read the Bible, I would say go there because it paints this beautiful picture that we don’t choose God, that He chooses us, and that His love is unending, and that we were bought and paid for whether we wanted to or not. And He gave that freely as a gift to us. And there is not a single thing in the world we could do that could separate us from that love. And in particular, at the very end, I think it’s 39 to 41, Paul writes about how the future nor the present can separate us from the love of God. And I always thought that was really interesting. Or angels nor demons can separate us from the love of God, nor governments, nor any powers that be. And the thought of I couldn’t do anything tomorrow that would separate me from that love, “Is that what you’re saying to me right now? That You know You love me so much that You knew everything I would do in my life and You didn’t care. You loved me and You wanted to transform me and You wanted to give me hope and save me.” That was a narrative I’d never heard before, and that was the truth of the Bible. And so I think reading that really transformed my entire view of what God was like. And just the story of Jesus, His love and how He came and He fulfilled the entire Old Testament in two phrases: “Love God with your whole heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” And if you’re not doing that, then you’re not following Christ, right? You’re not a Christian. It’s as simple as that. And so kind of having it all simplified down that way. It’s like I had been taught by the Pharisees and the Sadducees, you have to follow all these rules. And then Jesus came along in my life and said, “No, you don’t. Love me. Love God with your whole heart, mind, and soul. And love your neighbor as you love yourself, and you’ve got it covered. That’s all you got to do.” I was like, “What?” So I thought it was really beautiful. There’s so many beautiful truths that were revealed to me. It was obviously convincing enough for you to become a Christ follower, because that’s what baptism symbolizes, that you are a follower of Christ. Yeah. Wow. So how has your life changed since that time? I mean obviously you’ve come a long way in your very young life, but you’ve experienced a lot. And I wonder, how has it been to walk as someone who follows Christ, to have this completely different understanding of being completely and utterly loved in the way that you spoke of?  It’s been just better. And it’s like, just by following Christ does not mean that, when I struggle with depression or anxiety, that it just goes away. But these kind of things become less frequent and less intense. And following God has given me such freedom and beauty in my life. I no longer feel like I’m a slave to these sinful behaviors. And when I say sin, I always like… I think that term became so stigmatized by people who are outside the church. But sin is essentially things that God knows harms us or harms others, right? Or disrespects Him. And so putting it in that way, when I felt like I was freed from doing things that harmed me, that I was chained to, like, what a beautiful life that is, you know? And when I’m depressed and I have the week where I don’t want to get out of bed or shower or whatever it is, I still have His love waiting for me right there, holding me, all along. And once again, it’s not that it’s always easier. It’s never going to be easier following Christ, but it’s definitely better, because I know at the end of the day that all of this is temporary. And I know that He’s going to use my story. He’s going to use the fact that I was sexually assaulted. He’s going to use my past to help other people, and He has redeemed all of that pain in my life. So everything I’ve been through, and even more recently, since I’ve become a Christian, He’s used those things to help other people. And that is so healing for me to watch that, right? And to be close to people and connect to people and to be open and raw and real about what we actually experience. He’s given me a support system. He’s given me His unconditional love. He’s given me joy. And I think, most importantly, He’s encouraged me to not feel like I’m bound by anything of this world. So when it comes to my career, I’m never going to make films the same way again. Making films is completely different for me, because I know that God has given me my story and He gave everyone else their own testimonies. And so as a filmmaker, what I want to do is elevate their voices and to be in a position, I feel so blessed to be able to do that. So He’s given me a beautiful career, fulfillment in my career. I mean, I could talk all day about how much better God has made my life. That’s amazing! That’s amazing! And it is a beautiful life. You’re living a beautiful life. And beauty, and that doesn’t mean that there’s no pain, but with God with you, as you said at the very beginning, things can become beautiful even when they’re hard.  As we’re turning the page here, and you know what it’s like to be an atheist. You know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Christians like Polly and John, who offered not only their home to you, but were incredibly generous to you throughout a year or more, and beyond, I guess, and have always been there to support you. It sounds like they have the gift of hospitality and generosity, no doubt. Or Norm, I think of Norm, the man who was almost like the Good Samaritan, who was just making sure that you were attended to and coming back and just making sure you were attended to along the way. Those things were very strong touchstones in your life that affected you, that created openness towards the God of love that you eventually came to know. If you were giving advice to Christians on how to engage with people who don’t believe, what would you say to Christians, in terms of however you would want us to be or behave in the world to show Jesus, I guess.  I think all along what I really needed was somebody who was honest with me. And that was the thing about being around John and Polly. And in high school, I forgot to mention, but I had a teacher named Coach Campbell who…. All of them had this in common, where they were blatantly open about their sin, right? And not in a way that glorified sin, but in a way that made me think, like, “You have a faith like that, but then you do X, Y, and Z? And you’re open about that? Is that the kind of God you have? That God loves you anyways?” And I think that was the most important thing to me, was getting to know people who had a real faith that they were open about but didn’t pretend like they were perfect and that showed unconditional love. And Coach Campbell, the teacher I had in high school, he was the same way. Once a month, he would sit down and talk to us about whatever God had put on his mind that day, and it would always be something relevant to what was going on in our lives. And we didn’t know how that was even possible. I was like, “Okay, this guy must be like…. How does he know what’s going on in my life? He’s talking about it. This is creepy!” But it was amazing to be around someone like that, too, who openly shared, who was bold, but he didn’t say, “You need to believe this,” and, “You need to be like this.” I remember him having discussions of joy and happiness and the difference between the two and free will and sin and Satan and spiritual warfare, and he never was saying, “You have to believe in God.” He was just saying how the gospel had changed his life, and he was telling his story, and that’s what John and Polly did. So after all the hard things I went through, I realized once all that pain was redeemed, that all of that was a gift. That my testimony was a gift. Yes.  And that I didn’t have to force my friends to read the Bible or force my family, who have left the church but still don’t really know where they’re standing, to believe in the Trinity or whatever it is. All I have to do is love them. That’s it. And tell my story, because I think your story is the most important part. If you can tell that… because your story is a gift from God, and so if you can give them that message. And so we’re you know, Christ is in us. We become living with His word in us and give our testimony to other people. That’s how we make change. If someone had done that, the people that did do that are who God used to get me to where I am today. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. And for those who might be listening who are still skeptical and they’re perhaps a little bit open, curious about you, about your story, about how you found seemingly a God who was real, how would you encourage someone who might be open to taking another step or thinking about it more or…. What direction or how would you encourage someone like that?  I think there’s so many lies that circulate, from Satan, from the world, from people who claim to be Christian, about who God really is. And I was brutally taught that lesson from a young age. The idea of who God was that I had as a child versus how I know Him now is completely different. And the one thing that showed me that difference was actually reading the Bible. Not because someone forced you to and not John 3:16 on Google or someone posted it on Instagram in their bio, but actually picking up a Bible and reading it. And just asking whoever God is in your eyes to show you the truth. Because if you haven’t read it with a genuine curiosity for truth, that veil is still over your eyes, and you won’t get that. You are not able to see it. And as soon as I was able to see it, my entire life was changed, everything changed. And once again, as someone who has struggled throughout life with depression, it was so life changing. The joy that I have now and the happiness that I have from Him is incredible. Like, what do you have to lose just by picking up a Bible and asking for the truth and reading it? If anything, you will prove yourself right, and if you prove yourself wrong, you’ll live the rest of your life in joy. And I don’t think we can ask for much more than that. Right. No. That’s what we all long for, really. The Bible can be a little bit intimidating for someone who’s never really looked at it. Where would you encourage someone to begin reading? Because I know there’s the Old Testament, the New Testament. In the New Testament, the stories about Jesus are more there, and sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the weeds, you know, if you don’t know where you’re going. Where would you encourage, a particular book or place? I know you started in Genesis. Where would you encourage someone who was just opening the Bible for the first time?  So when I recommend just picking up the Bible and reading it—interesting because I would always pray and ask God where I should stop or where I should look. But if you open it up, and then you’re reading it and you’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know, this doesn’t make any sense to me.” New Testament. If you’re curious about Jesus, you know, Luke, Matthew, those are great places to start. Just hearing stories of His love and the kind of person He was on this earth, His generosity, how He treated the poor, the sick, how He raised the dead, and how He fed thousands. I mean, just the stories about Him are so beautiful, and you can get those in that area of the Bible, Luke, Matthew and that kind of stuff. If you have a background in Christianity but were atheist like I was and now you’re considering it again, maybe, I always go to Romans or Ephesians because there’s a lot of sanctification, a lot of grace, a lot of love, and what we think of how God views us as sinners, how Satan pushes these ideas in our heads that we can’t be forgiven or that we can’t change or that we don’t deserve love. All that is really cleared up in Romans and Ephesians, I would say. I think it’s been a beautiful, beautiful testimony. I really genuinely appreciate your transparency, Claire. I know it’s not easy to talk about certain things in your life, but you have done so with grace and again with transparency and authenticity. And I think, as you mentioned before, I think that there will be people who are blessed and benefit from knowing that about you and seeing the transformed life and that you can actually have joy beyond the darkness, that you can have hope and life that’s truly life beyond. I see in my mind that place where you were in Miami and that you’ve come such a long way since then and that you are an example of light and hope that we need so desperately in this world. So thank you so much for telling your story today, Claire. I really, really appreciate it.  Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Claire’s story. You can find out more about her and her films through her website at www.clairedooley.co, that’s dot C-O, which I’ll post in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website. Again, that’s at sidebstories.com. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, when we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

For two years, we’ve been sharing stories of atheist and skeptics’ journeys from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity. Thank you for listening and joining us along this journey. Visit www.sidebstories.com for the podcast archives, video library, and more resources!

Former atheist Dr. Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist, began an intensive search to discover the cause of the universe, and it led him to God. Reasons to Believe – www.reasons.org Resources by Hugh Ross: Always Be Ready:  A Call to Adverturous Faith Why the Universe is the Way it is A Matter of Days:  Resolving a Creation Controversy Improbable Planet:  How Earth Became Humanity’s Home Creator and the Cosmos:  How the Latest Scientific Discoveries Reveal God Who was Adam?  A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds.  There are big questions about the universe we live in. How did it all begin? Why does the universe appear to be so fine tuned for life? How did humans come to be? The answers to these and other questions are but a few of many that not only help us understand the bigger picture of reality, they also help us to understand ourselves. But how do we answer these big questions? Our guest today, a truly brilliant astrophysicist and theologian, Dr. Hugh Ross, has spent his life carefully, meticulously studying two sources which have helped him find the answers, the book of nature, that is what we observe around us in the world, in the cosmos, and the book of scripture, the Bible.  As an atheist, he was searching for the best explanation for what he observed in the cosmos. Were naturalistic theories sufficient to account for the origin and fine tuning of the universe of life? Or did he need to look beyond purely naturalistic causes to substantively ground what he was discovering? As an analytical scientist, he felt compelled to honestly, carefully search until his curiosity was satisfied.  Today, we’re going to hear Dr. Ross tell his fascinating story of moving from atheism to becoming a strong proponent of the Christian worldview. We’ll also hear him discuss the seeming inescapable relationship of science and belief in a Creator God. He is a prolific author, thinker, and scholar. You may have heard of him or his ministry, Reasons to Believe. I hope you’ll come along and listen to his amazing story and catch a glimpse of his extraordinary intellect.  Welcome to Side B Stories, Dr. Ross. It’s so great to have you with me today.  Well, thank you for inviting me, Jana. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners know a bit of the—I will say the word gravitas, that you bring to the table. It’s such a pleasure and privilege to have you, because of your expertise in so many ways. Could you just enlighten our listening audience a little bit as to your academic background?  Yeah. I have a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in astronomy from the University of Toronto. And I was on the research staff of Caltech for five years thereafter. And while I was at Caltech, I got called to join the pastoral staff of a church a few miles away and have been serving on the pastoral staff of that church for the past four decades. And it was that church that helped me launch Reasons to Believe some 36 years ago. And we’re basically a group of scientists and theologians that are developing new reasons to believe in the God of the Bible. Of course, that sets off curiosity in me in terms of how science and theology go together, but I’m sure we’re going to tease that out as we go. Let’s back up into your story as a child. Can you give us a sense of where you grew up? Let’s start there, with just where did you grow up? And tell me about the culture in terms of religious belief in the world around you.  Yeah, well I was born in Montreal, Canada, and my father had a thriving hydraulics engineering business, even though he only had a 10th grade education. He had several dozen engineers working for him. But then his financial partner saw the money and basically bankrupted the company and went to Brazil. So my dad had to lay off all the employees when I was four years of age and basically took what little money he had left and moved us all to Vancouver, British Columbia. So I grew up in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Vancouver, but it was in Vancouver, attending a public school, that I really got interested in astronomy. Your parents, did they have any faith in God? Did they have any belief that God existed at all in terms of just even your home life?  Well, they believed in the morality of Christianity, and so they certainly taught me and my two sisters moral principles. But they both denied eternal life, and so they just said, “This idea of a Trinity is nonsense. There’s no such thing as eternal life.” So they weren’t Christians. There were no Christians I knew of in our neighborhood. I really didn’t get to have a spiritual conversation with a Christian until I arrived at Caltech to do my postdoctoral research. And people often ask me, here in the United States, “How is that possible?” Well, it’s different in Canada. The Christians tend to isolate themselves in suburbs outside the big cities. So, for example, 60 miles away from downtown Vancouver, there’s a suburb that’s about 80% Christian. But where I was growing up, it was like 1%, and I had no contact with that 1%. So, yeah, I didn’t really know Christians during my growing up years, although I tell people I did see two Christians from thirty feet away when I was eleven years of age. And these were two businessmen that came into our public school and put two boxes on our teacher’s desk. They didn’t say a single word. They just put two boxes on our teacher’s desk and left. But in those boxes were Gideon Bibles. And we were all invited to take one home. And everybody in my class took one home. I took one home, but I didn’t pick it off my bookshelf until six years later. Okay. All right, so it sounds like that the Christian ethos or whatever, it was somewhat visible in your home with regard to morality, but in terms of practical practice and encountering Christians, that was fairly absent. So now take us back to you said you were seven years old, and you were having a conversation with your parents about the stars.  Well, Vancouver rains a lot, but I remember one night when the rain stopped and the clouds opened and you could see these stars, and I was struck by that and just said, “Hey, are those stars hot?” And that’s when my parents said, “Yeah, they are.” But they couldn’t tell me why. Now, the public school I attended, I was in grade two. At the beginning of grade two, the teacher took us on a field trip to the Vancouver Public Library, where they had 3 million volumes, huge library. And so I was fascinated by that library. And I remember that day going home with five books on physics and astronomy. That was the maximum you could check out. But I read those books in one week and went back to the library. And that was back in the 1950s, when parents felt okay, because they just basically gave me the bus fare. And by myself, I made three transfers to get to the Vancouver Public Library, checked out five more books, and brought them home. Parents today would never allow their children to do that by themselves at that age, but that was common back then. So that’s how I spent my Saturdays, going to the public library and bringing home four or five books. And they were always on physics and astronomy. I wasn’t interested in fiction. Occasionally, I would look at some other science books, but I basically gravitated to the physics and astronomy. And literally every year growing up, I would focus on a subdiscipline of astronomy. And it was at age 16, I said, “I’m going to study cosmology.” Okay.  Yeah. Let me ask you a question before we go there. I’m sure someone’s listening, just a little befuddled at the idea of a 7, 8, 9, 10 year old reading five books at that level of physics and astronomy and all of those things. Is there something unique about you that allows you that level of intellect that we should know?  Well, I’m on the autistic spectrum, and people with a high IQ that are on the autistic spectrum, they tend to behave like professors. They get focused on a subject, and they study that one subject to a great deal of depth. It might be dinosaurs. It might be fungi. For me, it was stars and galaxies and cosmology. And in one year, I had read all the books on physics and astronomy in the children’s section of the Vancouver Public Library, and I talked to the librarian, and she gave me an adult pass. And later on, I was able to get a pass to the university library. So growing up, I was reading everything I could get my hands on, and it was easy for me to comprehend it because I was so motivated. And then I started to basically specialize. Every year it’s like, okay, this year I’m going to study stellar atmospheres, this year the interior stars, next year galaxies. I was at age 16, I said, I’m going to look at cosmology, looking at the different models for the origin and history of the universe. Was there anyone able to converse with you in any kind of meaningful way on these scientific issues or issues of astronomy? Or was this something that you were completely pursuing independently?  I was doing it independently until I had hit age 15. And what happened at 15 is that there was a benefactor who came into the city and said he wanted to pull out the 25 top science students in the city. And so I was invited to sit for an all-day exam. It took 9 hours to take the test, but I was one of the 25 that was selected to be part of this program. And that’s where I got to know the science professors at the University of British Columbia. I also got involved in the Astronomy Club in Vancouver, and at age 16, they made me the director of observations. So I was actually giving lectures on astronomy at the university to adult audiences starting at age 16. And I then got involved in research on new forming stars in the Orion Nebula. My dad worked with me to build a telescope, so I used that on the few nights where it wasn’t raining to study these T Tauri stars, and I wound up winning the British Columbia Science Fair for my research. And then when I went on to the university, as a sophomore, I won the journal prize for the best science article in the Physics Society Journal. So that’s kind of what it was like. But my fascination was there. But I can remember when I was eleven years of age, my parents thinking that I was being obsessive about physics and astronomy. It seemed a mystery to me. Why are they worried about me? But they were, and so they wanted me to read outside of physics and astronomy. They tried to get me to read novels. I had no interest in novels. I only wanted nonfiction. And I did read a little bit of history. And so they wound up having me read this big, thick book of evolutionary biology at age eleven. I was the only one in the family that read it. But I said, “Mom, Dad, the numbers don’t add up. I see all this appearance of phyla, orders, and classes before humanity, but nothing after humanity. What’s going on?” They said, “Well, go talk to your science teachers.” They said, “Go talk to those science professors you know.” Nobody could give me an answer for why there was this discontinuity. But what happened at age 16, as I looked at the steady-state model for the universe, the oscillating model, the big bang model, but recognized that the evidence, the observations, heavily favored big bang cosmology. And I recognize, if it’s big bang, the universe has a beginning. If there’s a beginning, there must be a cosmic beginner. And so I said, “I want to find that cosmic beginner, but no one could guide me.” I said, “Well, I think the best place to look will be in the philosophy textbooks of Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant,” so I remember going through the Critique of Pure Reason and saying, “There’s a lot of internal contradictions in this that are not making sense.” And Descartes didn’t really satisfy me, either. And I went to a public high school, where we had refugees from around the world. And so that’s where people were telling me, “Hey, if you’re interested in this, look at Hinduism, look at Buddhism, because we have people from all different religious backgrounds.” So I went through the Hindu Vedas, the Buddhist commentaries, the Quran, the writings of the Zoroastrians, and finally, I picked up that Gideon Bible and began to go through it. Now, what is it about those religious texts, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Baháʼí, all of these religions that you investigated, why did they not satisfy? You were seeking an explanation for the beginning of the universe. So why did they not satisfy that or comport with that beginning of the universe?  Well, I first read a textbook on comparative religions, and I noticed that often the critiques of the world’s religions, they put their holy books in the worst possible interpretive light. And I said, “I’m not going to do that. I’m going to read these books in the best possible interpretive light, give them the benefit of the doubt, wherever that appears.” But what I discovered with the Hindu Vedas, for example, even when you put it in the best interpretive light, there are serious problems. I mean, the Vedas talk about how the universe has repeated beginnings every 4.32 billion years, and I knew that the number 4.32 was wrong. We have measurements that prove that it’s wrong. And this idea that the universe reincarnates. Most people know that Hinduism has this belief of the reincarnation of humans and animals, but it’s fundamentally based on the idea that the universe reincarnates. But I knew that the entropy of the universe was at least 100 million times too high for there to be any possible mechanism to reincarnate the universe. So I said, “Hey, this is not the pathway to the one that created the universe. And I did the same thing with the Buddhist commentaries. I looked at the Quran. I looked at the Mormon writings. I looked at Baháʼí. But that was all before I really looked at the Bible. But what struck me when I first picked up that Gideon Bible, going through the first page, Genesis 1, for six days God creates. On the seventh day he stops creating. And I noticed that, for the first six days, you have them closed out by, evening was, morning was, day two, three, four, et cetera. So I said, “It’s telling me each of these days has a start time and an end time.” But when I got to day seven, there’s no evening, morning phase, and that’s the day when God stops creating. So I remember going through the rest of the Bible quickly and discovered Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4, which basically exhort us humans to enter into God’s day of rest. So I said, “The day of rest is ongoing, and that explains the fossil record enigma, why we see all these new phyla, classes, and orders appearing before humanity, but none whatsoever after humanity.”  The six days are referring to the eras before humans. The seventh day is the human era. And so, ever since I was eleven, I was plagued by this enigma. And just looking at the first page of the Bible, I said, “This answers the fossil record enigma.” And also I spent 4 hours going through the Genesis 1 creation account, and again, part of it is that I was steeped in the scientific method. In the Canadian public education system, we were taught it in grade one, grade two, all the way through to grade twelve. But none of my public school teachers told me where the scientific method came from. When I began to go through that Gideon Bible, looking at the creation text, I said, “This is the scientific method. This is where it came from.” Because, when you look at Genesis 1, what it tells you is a frame of reference for the six days of creation. It’s God hovering over the surface of the waters, and it gives you the initial conditions as dark on the waters. The waters cover the whole surface. The Earth is empty of life and unfit for life. Well, those are steps one and two of the scientific method: Don’t interpret until you have first established the frame of reference. Don’t interpret until you have first established starting conditions. That’s right there in Genesis 1:2. And from that point of view you go through the six days of creation, and I realized everything here is correctly stated, and everything is in the correct chronological order when compared with established science. And long before that I’d looked at the Enuma Elish of the Babylonians. I looked at the creation text in the Quran, in the Buddhist commentaries, in the Vedas, and it’s like they got almost nothing right. The best I found outside of the Bible was a creation text that got 2 out of 14, 2 right, 12 wrong. The Bible got everything right and put everything in the correct chronological order. And so that began an 18-month study. Now, I knew my parents would be disturbed if they knew I was studying Christianity and the Bible to that degree. So I waited till midnight. Basically it was between midnight and about 1:00 or 1:30 in the morning where I’d have my bedroom door closed, and I’d be secretly studying the Bible and did that every night for an 18-month period. But after those 18 months, I recognized, “When I put the Bible in the best possible interpretive light, I cannot find a single error or contradiction.” And that persuaded me. This book is not just written by human beings. It must be inspired by the One that created the universe. And so it was at age 19, I signed my name in the back of the Gideon Bible, committing my life to Jesus Christ. But to be frank, it wasn’t just me checking out the science. I also checked out the fulfilled prophecies in the Bible. And I think what really struck me when I first began through the Bible was the elegance and the beauty of its moral message. Because all the holy books have a moral message, but they pale in comparison to the elegance, the consistency, and the beauty of what you see in the Bible. And one of the things I did during those 18 months is say, “I’m going to do everything I can to live up to this moral message. It’s so beautiful.” But the harder I tried, the more I realized I couldn’t do it. And I need to give credit to the Gideons. They tell you exactly what you need to do once you become persuaded that what you’re reading is the inspired inerrant word of God. And they have a page there where they say… The primary message is, “We humans need God. We cannot live up to His moral standard, but God is willing to do for us what we can’t do for ourselves. He’s willing to trade His moral perfection for our moral imperfection,” and I also appreciated what they were saying is that the Creator of the universe knows better than we do what’s best for us. So it only makes rational sense to make the Creator of the universe the boss of your life. And of course, they describe how the Creator of the universe came to Planet Earth as a human being, demonstrated a life of moral perfection, proved that He was God through the miracles He performed, and yet willingly sacrificed His life so that we can be delivered from the consequences of our sin. So I remember thinking to myself, “This is an offer that’s too good to turn down,” so I signed my name on the back of that Gideon Bible, committing my life to Jesus Christ. Amazing. It’s interesting how your curiosity, your scientific curiosity is what drove you to the philosophies and the religions. But I don’t suppose that you were anticipating this kind of whole life change based upon what you were reading. You were seeking an explanation for the beginning of the universe, but you ended, not only with an answer to that question, but also as the Creator as Lord of your life.  Right. I had been exposed to little snippets. I mean, even though my parents were not Christians, didn’t believe in the Christian message. I remember, growing up—my father, when I told him this, said he had no recollection, but I was about ten or eleven, and out came from his mouth, “There is a way which seems right to a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.” And he claims he had no idea where that came from. He had no idea it was in the Bible. But he said that once after a dinner conversation. And I got to think about that, you know? “What’s going to happen? This life here on Earth is short, and I’m pursuing this career in astrophysics. Is that really the best way I can spend my short time here on Earth?” So it got me thinking. I also remember, when I was about eight or nine, my parents went to a department store in downtown Vancouver, and they couldn’t afford a babysitter, so they dragged me and my two sisters on the bus to do their shopping. And we got off the bus. There was a street preacher there with about a dozen people around them. I remember my parents saying, “We’ve got to get away from that nut,” and so they dragged us away as fast as possible. But I heard about 15 seconds of what he was saying, and it got me thinking, because in those 15 seconds, he talked about the fact that we cannot deliver ourselves from our own failings. So that’s all I heard, but it got me thinking. And that one Bible passage my dad quoted got me thinking. So I imagine, as someone listening to this, they think that there’s no way that science can be reconciled with belief in a god. That for them seems rather an archaic or superstitious position. How would you respond to that? Obviously your entire work has been a response to that question. But if someone were to ask you that, how would you answer them?  Well, it was recognizing that the universe had a beginning. And that was followed up by the spacetime theorems, which proved that the universe not only has a beginning, but the spacetime dimensions also have a beginning, which implies that the cause of the universe must be some entity beyond space, time, matter, and energy. So I recognized that in my late teens and said, “There’s got to be some kind of God. I need to find that God, that cosmic beginner.” And in my studies of science, I realized the laws of physics are never violated. They’re consistent, they’re constant, throughout the entire universe, throughout the whole history of the universe. I can really trust what I’m seeing in the world and the universe around me. It’s a revelation of truth. And I also realized that, “Hey, we humans are personal. We’re capable of free will and expressing and receiving love. The Creator of the universe must have those characteristics as well.” So when I heard about these different philosophers and people of different religions claiming that the creator of the universe had communicated to us, I said, “Well, that’s within reason,” but I also knew that all these different holy books contradicted one another. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to check them each out and see if any of them has any validity.” But it made sense to me that this personal, loving Creator Who’s provided for all of our needs would want to communicate. So I began to go… and again, I put these books in the best possible interpretive light, and that was based on the belief it makes sense that this God would want to communicate. But the ministry of founded reasons to believe is founded on the two books principle, that God has revealed himself through two books, the book of nature and the book of scripture. And it comes from the same God for whom it’s impossible to lie or deceive. And so I was looking for a book that would concord with what I knew to be true in the book of nature. And it took me 18 months, studying an hour to an hour and a half at night, but I finally came to the conclusion, this is it. I love that both the book of nature and book of Scripture is just such a succinct but clear picture of the comprehensive unity, really, of a God who is the God of all truth, God of the Bible, God of the universe. For those who aren’t familiar with the way that you interpret the creation accounts and how you’re able to marry those with what we find in current scientific study, I’m imagining that they would want some clarification because, obviously in the Christian worldview, there are different interpretations.  Sure. And could you explain some of that for us, please?  Yes. Well, you heard earlier that I’m on the autistic spectrum, and everybody who’s on the spectrum is different from everybody else in the spectrum. As I talk to parents who have autistic children, I say, “You need to find their special, unique gift, and it’s going to be different for every child.” And what I’ve discovered is the gift that I seem to have is the capacity to integrate across multiple complex disciplines. And I approach the Bible the same way, integrate the 66 books of the Bible, and so when it comes to the creation text of the Bible, it’s like I hold off of my interpretation until I’ve examined all the creation texts in the Bible. And my principle is to interpret them both literally and consistently, because I remember going through these creation texts and realizing they’re written very differently than the creation texts you see in the Quran or the Hindu Vedas, namely that they are devoid of metaphorical language or allegorical language. And there’s a strict chronology that’s implied there. There’s a historicity. So that told me these texts are designed to be interpreted literally, but literally and consistently. And so how I help Christians with these different creation interpretations is to say, “Let’s go through all the creation texts, realizing this comes from a God for whom it’s impossible to lie or deceive. So if your interpretation of Genesis 1 contradicts your interpretation of Hebrews or your interpretation of Romans, then you know you need to adjust your interpretation,  because God’s not going to contradict himself.” So that’s kind of my guiding interpretive principle, and I apply that too to my science. So for example, when I’m engaging evolutionary biologists, I say, “When we look at the history of Earths’ life, we need to not only examine it in the context of paleontology, the fossil record, we also need to look at it in the context of genetics, and not just genetics and paleontology. We need to look at it in the context of solar astrophysics.” And whenever I do that with biologists, they say, “What on earth does the sun have to do with it?” I said, “Well, as an astronomer, I can tell you that the sun gets brighter and brighter as it fuses hydrogen to helium, and therefore, unless you have the Creator intervening and removing life from Planet Earth and replacing it with new life on a regular basis, throughout the history of life on Planet Earth, the surface of the Earth would become so hot that it would bring about the sterilization of all life on planet Earth. But what, in fact, the Creator has done is, by removing life and replacing with new life that’s more efficient and pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere as the sun gets brighter and brighter, we have God by creating just the right life on planet Earth at just the right time, pulling the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere down to perfectly compensate for the increasing brightness of the sun. And so I say, “Yes, you can look at the genetics and think there’s no God involved there, but only a mind that knows the future physics of the sun would know which life to remove from Planet Earth and which new life to replace it with.” And then that also brings up the issue of integrating the biblical text, because they’ll say, “There’s nothing like that in Genesis.” I say, “Yes, I agree with you, but it’s in Psalm 104, the longest of the creation psalms in the Bible. And if you go to verses 29 and 30, it says it’s the property of all life to die off, but God recreates and renews the face of the Earth.” He’s constantly removing life from planet Earth and replacing with new life. And I say, “Look at the fossil record. What you can easily document is that it’s filled with mass extinction events, quickly followed by mass speciation events.” I say, “Notice King David said it first 3,000 years ago. Only now in the 21st century have we discovered that indeed the fossil record is typified by these mass extinction events, followed by mass speciation events. But it’s exactly what needs to be done to compensate for the increasing luminosity of the sun.” So that’s kind of what I’ve dedicated my life to, integrating all these complex scientific disciplines and integrating them with the 66 books of the Bible to basically show people this is the pathway to truth, and this is the pathway to receiving truth, life, and love from the Creator of the universe. I’ve heard you speak also in terms of the predictive value of scripture, and that that was in some ways convincing to you that there actually was a Creator or a mind outside of the universe itself. Could you speak to some of that?  Well, you heard me say it took me about 18 months to get from Genesis to the end of the Book of Revelation, and that’s because I was checking out all the predictions I saw in the Bible. And there are two categories of predictions: The Bible predicts future scientific discoveries. It also predicts future events in the history of humanity. So I would read these in the Bible, go to the university library, and basically see whether or not these statements in the Bible really were correct. Really and accurately predicted future scientific discoveries and future historical events. And during that 18-month period, I had a notebook where I was actually collecting all the places where the Bible had correctly predicted, and I was committed. I said, “If I find one where I can clearly say the Bible got it wrong, that’s enough for me to say this is not the word of God.” By the end of 18 months, I couldn’t find a single place where the Bible got it provably incorrect. I’ll admit this: I found passages I didn’t understand. But the ones I did understand, everything was accurate and correct. So I already shared how, going through Genesis 1, I realized all the creation events are correctly described in the correct chronological order, which was way beyond the science of Moses. Some of these things have only been verified in our lifetime. I also discovered that the Bible had accurately predicted the four fundamental features of big bang cosmology and again recognize no one even had a hint that the universe had these characteristics until the 20th century. And that was also captured by fulfilled human prophecy. You read the book of Daniel, and Daniel speaks how there will be four major world empires that will rise upon the face of the Earth. And he was a contemporary of the Babylonian empire, but he predicted the rise of the Greek Empire and the rise of the Roman Empire in great detail. And so I said, “Hey, this is an example where he got it right.” And then the prophecies of the coming of the Messiah. There’s over 100 that were fulfilled by the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and even prophecies about the modern nation, Israel. I remember going through the book of Ezekiel and saying, “I’ve got to check this stuff out.” I literally spent two days with a physics friend of mine. He was my lab partner. He was not a believer. I was not a believer. But we went through these microfiche of newspapers published in ’46 and ’47 and ’48 and realized we had just demonstrated that the Bible had precisely predicted the events that we now recognize as the rebirth of the nation of Israel. So that’s what brought me to faith in Christ, seeing that predictive power. And that’s amazing. There are a lot of skeptics who push back against a biblical creation because they say that—I believe that they conflate all creation models because they don’t seem to tease out the fact that there are some who believe in a literal 24-hour day in Genesis and there are some who interpret the word day in a different way, but still allow for special creation of Adam and Eve, that the historicity of the text is not lost in that way. Could you tease that out a little bit, especially for even the Christian who might be confused or are hearing this for the first time or even for the skeptic?  Sure. Well, I run into skeptical scientists and engineers very frequently, as you can imagine. And what I hear all the time is: “How can you possibly believe this Bible when, even on the first page it gets everything dead wrong?” And I said, “Well, from what point of view are you interpreting that text?” And what I hear is they say, “Well, God above is telling us a story of what He claims to have done here on planet Earth.” And I said, “Well, you have the right frame of reference for the universe, Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.” And a lot of them say, “Hey, the Bible got it is dead wrong there. We know the universe was first and the Earth later.” I said, “You are aware this was not written in English, right? It was written in Hebrew. And in Biblical Hebrew, there is no word for universe. They use an idiom for the universe instead, and the idiom is the heavens and the earth. It’s used 13 times in the Old Testament, always referring to the totality of physical reality.” So that helps them. But I said, “Notice this: The frame of reference, the text changes it from the universe in Genesis 1:1 to the surface of the Earth in Genesis 1:2. And I agree with you, if the frame of reference is above the clouds of the Earth, then the text is teaching nothing but scientific nonsense. But if you put the frame of reference on the surface of the Earth, everything is a perfect fit with the established scientific record.” And for many of the skeptics I run into, that’s a mind blower for them. But I also try to remind them it was Galileo who said, “The biggest mistake you can make in Bible interpretation is to get the wrong frame of reference.” And here’s a perfect example right in the first page. Get the wrong frame of reference, it’s teaching nothing but scientific nonsense. But with the stated frame of reference, it’s a perfect fit. And as far as the days of creation go, again, I say the challenge… notice there’s 40 really good translations of the Bible in the English language. The reason for that? Biblical Hebrew has only 3,000 words in its vocabulary, if you don’t count the names of people and cities. English is the biggest vocabulary language. It’s more than 4 million words. So naturally we’re going to need multiple translations to try to communicate what’s in that original Hebrew. And so I encourage people: “You got questions, don’t just look at one translation. One translation will not be adequate. You need to look at multiple translations.” But I said, “Look, even without any knowledge of Hebrew, when you look at Genesis 1, it’s clear that this word day must have at least three distinct literal definitions, because three are used in the text. On creation day one, it uses the word day for the daylight hours. On creation day four, it uses the word day for one rotation period of the Earth. But in Genesis 2:4, it uses that same word day to refer to the entirety of creation history. So that day is a long period of time. And you heard me just say earlier, when you go through the seven days of creation, the first six days are bracketed by an evening and a morning, implying they have a start time and an end time. But there is no such statement for day seven. We’re still in the 7th day. And if we’re still in the 7th day, then these days of creation must be long periods of time. And I take the point, I do translate that God created in six literal days, recognizing there’s four distinct literal definitions of the Hebrew word yom that’s translated as day. And to my scientist skeptical friends, I said, “I know you interpret science from a purely naturalistic perspective. And that makes sense if you’re doing your science in the human era, because the Bible says God has rested from His work of creation. So when you’re doing research in the human era, you’re only going to see naturalistic processes, but it’s an error to think that that applies all the way back to the beginning of the universe. Previous to the human era, naturalistic process is not adequate to explain what we see revealed in the record of nature. It’s a combination of naturalistic processes and divine miraculous intervention. And that explains why so few biologists are Christians, because most of them focus their research on the human era. It explains why so many astronomers are Christians, because their data comes from deep time. It takes time for the light of stars and galaxies to reach our telescopes. So most of what we do in astronomy is looking into the six days of creation. Most of what biologists are doing is looking at day seven. And so it explains why there’s a theological and philosophical distinction for what you see in people in the social sciences, the life sciences, and the physical sciences. Social science, it’s 100% the human era. So no wonder that the number of believers in the social science is as low as it is. They’re focused on the wrong day. That makes sense to me. You’re getting a context of the whole, not just the part. You’re not conflating the part to the whole. You’re seeing the big picture. And I love that. One other clarification, and that is sometimes I think that there’s a presumption, if you believe in an older ancient universe, in an older Earth, that somehow you don’t believe in the special creation of man, that you are an evolutionist. But that’s not necessarily the case. Again, for our listeners, to provide clarity, could you talk about that for just a moment?  Yeah, I sure can. I mean, our position at Reasons to Believe is that we acknowledge that all of humanity is descended from one man and one woman that God specially created in a garden in the Persian Gulf region. I mean, Genesis 2 tells us. There are four known rivers, the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, come close together in the Garden of Eden, and two of those rivers are flowing today, two are dry river beds, and that tells me that this must be an ice age event, because only during an ice age would all four rivers be flowing. And then where they come together is in the southeastern part of the Persian Gulf, which today is more than 200ft below sea level. But during the last ice age, it was above sea level. So I think Genesis 2 is implying that God created Adam and Eve sometime during the last ice age, which would be 15,000 to about 120,000 years ago. Scientists have come up with a date for the origin of humanity based on genetics, but the date isn’t very accurate. It’s 150,000 years ago plus or minus 150,000 years. In a lot of popular literature, they’ll say scientific evidence proves that humans originated 300,000 years ago, but they’re simply taking you to the very far edge of the error bar. The truth is it’s between 0 and 300,000. Take your pick. Although radiometric carbon dating would tell us that humans have been here on Earth for at least the past 40,000 years. So somewhere between 40,000 and 300,000, but the Bible gives you a narrower time frame. It would be previous to about 120,000 years ago, but at a time when the Garden of Eden would have been above sea level. And geneticists will say, “Well, if you look at the genetics, it seems to indicate that humans are descended, not from two people, but a population of several hundred, maybe even a few thousand.” I mean, Francis Collins wrote in his book 10,000 individuals, but that same genetic data also has large systematic errors which would permit the human species from being descended from a maximum of 10,000 individuals to a minimum of two. So two is certainly within the range of scientific credibility. In fact, you were mentioning earlier, before we got started, about a debate I had with the president of BioLogos, Deborah Haarsma. And I was sharing with her, “Well, when I was growing up, they were saying the ancestral population was 1 million, and then when I got into my 20s, they said 100,000. Francis Collins says 10,000. A debate my colleague, Fazale Rana, had with Dennis Venema, they said somewhere between 800 and 1200.” And she says, “Well, we at BioLogos could go as low as 132.” And I said, “Well, Deborah, how about if we plot a graph to see where it’s been going? One million, 100,000, 10,000, 800, 132. If we extrapolate, it seems to be heading towards the biblical two.” So I’m just saying let’s wait and see, but my experience of my lifetime is, the more we study the book of nature, the more evidence we uncover for the supernatural handiwork of God. And I personally model that. Every week I write a 1000- to 1500-word article on our reasons.org website. It’s called “Today’s New Reason to Believe.” So literally, just combing the scientific literature, I’m able to produce an article on a weekly basis showing the more we learn about nature, the stronger becomes the case for the God of the Bible. And I can tell you this, if I had time, I could write six articles every day. That’s how much is being published in the scientific literature. But I’m only one person, so I pick one of those discoveries and write one article a week. Now, you have written several books. If this has really piqued someone’s interest and they’re wanting to take a look, I know you’ve written in several different areas, but could you highlight a few books that might be good for our listeners to know?  Yeah. I just finished my 23rd book, but a lot of my books focus on this two-books model and how, the more we learn about nature, the more evidence we get for the inerrancy of the Bible and the Christian faith. My best selling book is The Creator in the Cosmos, now in it’s fourth edition. One book that laypeople like because it’s short and it’s easy to read, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is. And another one would be Improbable Planet. And just this month, we’re releasing a brand new book, Designed to the Core. So, yeah, I got lots of books on this subject. And you can get free chapters of my books at reasons.org/ross. That’s wonderful! That’s great! So again, at the end of the day, at 19, you signed your name in this Gideon Bible. And it sounds like, from an intellectual point of view, as well as a spiritual point of view, it sounds like the world started to make sense in a comprehensive way, that all of the pieces came together, that you were able to put together the book of nature and the book of Scripture, and that it informs now perhaps everything that you do.  Well, it was a turning point in my life, because I just finished my sophomore year at university. I was going into my junior year, but I saw my academic career catapult in the sense that, once I gave my life to Jesus Christ, suddenly my ability to comprehend what was in the Bible was much greater than it was before. And likewise, my grades began to catapult. I saw much greater success in my studies in science. Research became much more fun for me. And something I’ve noticed, especially amongst my peers who are scientists and engineers: When they develop that strong emotional bond with their Creator, their ability to perform catapults.Their abilities to do things becomes greatly enhanced through that relationship. The same thing is true of us human beings, that our capacities and abilities become much greater once we have that bond with a higher being. That’s extraordinary. It sounds like, again, your life and your work has been just prolific. And so many lives have been touched by your faithful dedication and obvious passion to discover more and more about the truth of the Creator, the truth of creation, and also your passion for Christ, and that Christ is known by all.  As we’re turning the page here and thinking about the skeptics who are listening, what would you advise them, in terms of, perhaps they can look in a meaningful way. I think one of the things that impresses me about Reasons to Believe is that you put forth a Biblical creation model that is testable and predictive. And that might be surprising to someone who’s listening, that anything about Biblical or creation model could be testable and predictive. Well, thank you for the opening, because what we’ve done at Reasons to Believe is go to secular university campuses, and we will briefly present an outline of our testable biblical creation model. And then we invite a panel of science professors who are not believers to critique our model, and then we open it up for Q&A with the students and the faculty. And every time we’ve done that, the critique we get is not about the data. It’s not about our interpretation. They tend to drift off into the philosophy of science. “Can we really apply this to this?” But the audience picks up on it right away. They had an opportunity to critique the model, and they didn’t provide any scientific critique of the model. It was only philosophy that they responded with. And so it’s opened a door for us. And what I’ve been doing recently with scientists is say, “Look. So I read my Bible. It says that God begins His works of redemption before He creates anything at all.” In my newest book, Designed to the Core, I basically demonstrate the fine tuning evidence for the God of the Bible is most spectacular in the context of what’s necessary for billions of human beings to be redeemed from their sin and evil. So what I’ve been sharing with my colleagues who are not yet believers: “Look, I know you’re not a Christian. I know you don’t believe in God. But why don’t you try this experiment? Do your scientific research from a Biblical redemptive perspective and see if it doesn’t make you a more successful scientist. Put it to the test and see what happens.” So that’s kind of a new way I developed for sharing my faith with skeptical scientists and engineers. Just challenge them. “Try this and see what it does for you. If it makes you a more successful scientist, if you’re able to be more productive in your scientific discoveries, then maybe you need to pick up the Bible and look and study its message of what it means for you.” That’s good advice. And for the Christians who are listening in, I know that there are probably many who have skeptics who push back, who are scientists, that they don’t think that religion has any part of their world. How could you advise Christians to meaningfully engage with those who are skeptical around them?  Well, I’ve been a pastor for more than four decades in a church that’s sandwich between Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And what I’ve discovered is the primary reason why people don’t share their faith with adults: They don’t feel that they’re prepared. And I see that in 1 Peter 3:15, “Always be ready to share the reasons for the faith and hope you have in Jesus Christ with gentleness, respect, and a clear conscience.” So my advice is: Step one, get prepared. And that’s what our mission at Reasons to Believe is all about. We write articles, we do books, we do video, all designed to prepare believers to be able to share their faith. A lot of our material is designed to persuade those that are highly educated, either in science or theology or philosophy, or all three. But I said, get those books. You can skim them, get an idea of what they’re all about, and then when you run into people that are skeptics, say, “I’ve got something I want to give to you,” but at least skim it so that you have an opportunity after they’ve read the book, to say, “Hey, how about we have lunch together and talk about what you found in that book?” And if you get stuck, we’re here to back you up. And so I know one lady who was sharing with a scientist, gave him a couple of my books. He had a ton of questions. They wound up having lunch, and it was way over her head. But she says, “I think I can set up a Zoom meeting for you with the scientists of Reasons to Believe. And that was very productive. I know one lady who hasn’t read any of my books, but she’s given away more than 250 of my books to people who are not yet believers. And she keeps sending me notes of how those books have brought people to faith in Christ. That’s extraordinary! I think sometimes half of the work is just knowing what’s available, knowing the resources. I mean, not all of us can be astrophysicists, but we can be familiar with what’s available from those who are and can make connections, and it sounds extraordinary to me, too, that you would offer your expertise on a Zoom meeting, for example, or someone on your staff, to be able to talk through or walk through issues with people who are genuinely curious and asking those questions.  Well, I think that’s crucial. It’s not just resources that people need. They need that human contact. Yes.  One example happened where there was a bunch of professors at a university in the United Kingdom. They were part of a book club, and there was only one Christian in the book club. But they said, “How about if we look at this book?” And they said, “Well, that’s quite different from what we normally look at,” but they gave it a go. But they invited me in after they had read the book. So I spent 2 hours just answering their questions. And, yeah, it was very fruitful in the sense that they all said, “We need to seriously consider this. This is serious stuff. It’s not fluff.” It is. I think oftentimes the Christian story or narrative is just written off as a myth, just like everything else, that it’s not substantive. But as you’ve seen and you’ve shown through your extraordinary journey of investigation, through not only the religious texts, but also the scientific texts, [1:03:05] this is the worldview that substance resides. It is where things come together, where things make sense. It is a comprehensive worldview. It’s integrated. It’s explanatory. Like you say, it’s predictive. There’s so much there to be known. And I think that there are so many who would be surprised if they’re willing to take a look, like you have.  I so appreciate even your example, as well as your story. Of course, you’re a genius. But I think what is one of the most pressing things, impressive things to me, is that you were willing to investigate until you found the answers that were satisfying to you, the answers that seemed to match with reality, with what you were seeing in the world, and in the textbooks, and what you’re observing in the cosmos, and that it made sense to you. And also, of course, that you love to share what you know. We’re all benefiting from the hard work and investigation and from your genius. So thank you so much.  You’re very welcome. But I think one of the unique features of human beings compared to all other life: We’re compulsively curious, not just about where we’re going to get our daily food. We’re curious about those distant black holes and quasars and creatures that exist on the other side of the world. And it’s fun. And what I noticed in the Bible, it says we’re to study both the book of nature and the book of scripture. So what I share with people is do not leave it up to the theologians to study the book of scripture. It’s way too much fun. Everybody needs to be involved. And don’t leave it up to the scientists to study the book of nature. It’s way too much fun. You need to get involved and pull together both books. So God wants us to be engaged. Let’s have fun. Yes. And of course, the more you know about His world, the more you know about Him, right?  Right. Thank you again, Dr. Ross, for coming on today. It’s been nothing but pure pleasure.  Well, thank you. Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Dr. Ross’s story. You can find out more about his books, writing and speaking through his website, reasons.org, which I’ll post in the episode notes. He’s also written a book with regard to his story of conversion, called Always Be Ready. You can access a complimentary chapter also on his website, reasons.org. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website, sidebstories.com. I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.   

Former skeptic Dr. Fazale Rana, a biochemist, began to question whether evolution could explain the origin of life. He began to reconsider the need for God. Reasons to Believe: www.reasons.org Resources by Fazale Rana Humans 2.0 – Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives on Transhumanism The Cell’s Design – How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry Fit for a Purpose – Does the Anthropic Principle Include Biochemistry? Who was Adam?  A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity Origins of Life Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics slip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been a skeptic, but who became Christian against all odds.  We all have assumptions about reality, about the way things are in the world. Most of the time, we’re pretty settled in our beliefs. We don’t question them, especially if they seem to make sense to us. They seem true to us and to those around us. But what happens when those beliefs are challenged, when we are presented with new information? We’re generally confronted with a couple of options. We can shut down any opposing viewpoint without consideration and listen to those only within our own camp and become more convinced in our own beliefs. Or we can become open to other ideas, take a closer look at the confounding issue at hand, and look for the best explanation, the one that makes the most sense of what we’re seeing or experiencing.  But sometimes taking a closer look can be difficult. It can come with costs. We may need to reorient our own views in a way that seems a bit uncomfortable, that takes us in a direction we never anticipated. We all want to be intellectually honest, or at least think that we are. But that road can be both challenging and demanding, especially if we find that the truth leads us to situations or intellectual positions we thought we would never seriously consider, much less believe.  As a brilliant scientist, biochemist, and author, Dr. Fuz Rana valued objective truth. His intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and openness led him beyond his naturalistic presumptions to go where the evidence led him from skepticism to belief in a Creator God as the best explanation for what we see in biology, in all of reality. I hope you’ll come and join in to listen to his fascinating story, as well as his perspectives on whether and how science and belief can and do relate to each other.  It should be interesting.  Welcome to Side B Stories, Fuz. It’s so great to have you with me today.  Jana thank you for having me. Wonderful. Before we get started into your story, I’d really love for the listeners to know a little bit about you. You’re quite an accomplished, credentialed scientist. So talk to us a little bit about who you are, in terms of the things that you’ve studied and where you are now in your professional life.  Yeah, well, I have a PhD in biochemistry, earned the PhD from Ohio University, and then afterwards did a postdoc at the University of Virginia and then another one at the University of Georgia. And so my area of specialization, if anybody cares, is cell membrane biochemistry and biophysics. And after my second postdoc, I took a position in research and development for a Fortune 500 company and worked there for nearly a decade before joining Reasons to Believe 23 years ago. And I’m, just in the last few weeks, assuming the role of president and CEO of Reasons to Believe, And, you know, this is an exciting organization, where we really look at opening up the gospel for people by revealing God in science. So science played an important role in my conversion to Christianity, and so I’m utterly convinced that, through science, people can see the reality of God’s existence and be set on a journey to come to know Him. So it’s a fascinating place to work. I’ve been privileged to be here for 23 years. It sounds very fascinating, and I really would want to venture into some of that relationship between science and faith as we move through your story. Let’s start at the beginning of your story, though, Fuz. Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Tell me where you were born. What area of the country. Were you from the United States? Where you grew up, what that was like in terms of your home, and was it a religious home at all? Walk us through that.  Sure, sure. Well, my father was from India, and he lived in India prior to the partition taking place, where India won its independence from Great Britain. And when that happened, the states of East and West Pakistan were created, and my father’s family were Muslims, and so they were forced to immigrate into the state of Pakistan as a result of that. My father was a nuclear physicist, and so he came to the United States through Canada, where he did a PhD in nuclear physics, and he worked for a number of years in research and development. This was in the 1950s, and of course, being a nuclear physicist in those days was the ticket to have in the sciences, and he eventually left his work at General Dynamics and took up a university position at North Dakota State University. And that’s where he met my mother, who came from a Catholic background. Her family are Germans, and so they agreed to disagree. My father was devout as a Muslim, and usually if a non-Muslim marries a Muslim, the expectation is that a conversion will take place, where that person will convert to Islam. But my father was very devout, but also very progressive and modern in his views of Islam. And so he never expected or asked my mom to convert to Islam, but she was really a nonpracticing Catholic. So, as my brother and I were growing up in our household, we were exposed primarily to Islam. But my mom’s parents were devout Catholics, and so when they would come to visit or we would go visit them, part of that experience was always going to Catholic Church, so I had a little bit of exposure to Catholicism growing up as well. I was born in Ames, Iowa, in the Midwest, and then ended up growing up, for the most part, in West Virginia. We moved there when I was four. My father took a position at West Virginia Institute of Technology as the chairman of the physics department, and so I consider myself really to be from West Virginia. If you ask me where I’m from, that’s where I’d say, from West Virginia. So that was a bit about where I’m from and kind of a little bit about my family background. That would be interesting, growing up with two very different religious perspectives, one from your mother’s side, one from your father’s side, and it sounds like there was more active participation, perhaps in the more Islamic part of your religious upbringing. Was that confusing for you at all, in terms of doing something Catholic with one side of the family and Muslim on another side?  Not really. It just was the way it was. That was the way it was from the very beginning. And there was a lot of discussion from my father about Islam relative to Christianity, where he had a rather negative view of the Christian faith for the most part. He would not go to Catholic Church, as you might imagine, with my mother and her family. But my father was open minded in many respects, though. I mean, he was, again, very devout, but he wasn’t dogmatic. He always kind of left it up to my brother and I to really make our own decisions when it came to things involving religion. For him, the most important things were our academics, and so he was very much interested in our academic pursuits. That was really… If there was anything that was non-negotiable in our household, it was not excelling in academics. My father very much lived out his faith. I remember him getting up every morning, and he would go through a ritual cleansing and then pray to Mecca facing the east, laying out a prayer carpet. He would carry a prayer book with him in his breast pocket everywhere he went. So he really was very devout as a Muslim. And again, he never really imposed Islam on my brother and I. But you catch things by osmosis many times. And I can remember, in West Virginia at that time, there weren’t mosques anywhere. And so, from time to time, we would actually go to prayer meetings that were hosted at a friend of his home who would invite Muslims in the community to come. And so I would go through prayer with my father and kind of learned a little bit about, quite a bit, actually, about Islamic theology, again, just through casual conversations with my father. But when I was a teenager, I became very interested in Islam, and I think part of it was I just wanted to connect a little bit with my father. Part of it was really trying to come to grips with my heritage. So my father taught me how to pray, and I began to read from the Quran. I recited the Shahada, which was the declaration that Allah was the one true God and Muhammad was his one true prophet, and spent probably a good course of a year, year and a half of actually exploring Islam. I can remember telling my friends that I actually identified as a Muslim, which was not necessarily an easy thing growing up in West Virginia, which was in the heart of the Bible Belt. So I can remember a few instances where I was actually treated poorly as a result of that. In the 1970s when the Iranian hostage crisis took place, my friends actually… A couple of them actually beat me up a little bit. Not really badly, but kind of pushed me around a little bit because of that. And I can remember one time somebody in the locker room… there were all kinds of locker room antics that went on back in those days. Things weren’t very well supervised. I could tell you some stories that are not necessarily appropriate, some of the things we did, but I remember one instance somebody washing my mouth out with soap because I had Allah on my mouth and that type of thing. So I went through that experience because I identified as a Muslim. But yeah. Would you say… during that time obviously you were identifying as a Muslim. You were reading the Quran. You were going through some ritual prayer. Would you say that… It sounds as if you held some kind of a belief in some kind of a higher power, Allah, at that time, I would imagine.  Yeah. I don’t ever recall, growing up, really doubting God’s existence, at least as a young man. But after a period of time, I just kind of became disillusioned with Islam. Part of it was, for me, reading the Quran, at least at that point, seemed very… it was just very esoteric. It didn’t make a lot of sense, didn’t have a lot of meaning for me. The prayer became burdensome. It was something that—in Islam you pray as an obligation, not as a way to commune with God. It’s an obligation. In fact, in Islam, God is unknowable. We can’t know God in the way that a Christian would say that they know and experience God. And I remember an instance where, I was probably a junior, the world history teacher that I had knew that my father was a Muslim and asked if he would be willing to come to class and just talk about Islam. And my father refused to do that. He felt like that was just putting a target on my back. And so that really had an impact on me, because it’s like, “Okay, you live a life, and you are sincerely devout, but you’re not willing to actually express your belief. And so if that’s the case, is this really true?” And that had an impact on me. And this was about the time when I was getting ready to graduate from high school, and so there were other things that were interesting to me, too, that were competing. Girls, rock music, sports. It was a bunch of things. And so it was probably a combination of things that really just led me to really give up on Islam. Okay. Now, you said that you were in West Virginia, which you characterized as in the Bible Belt. So you were surrounded in some sense by Christians, or at least cultural Christianity. What was your experience with Christians at that time? Yeah. Well, both my mother and my father had a fairly negative view of Christianity. And of course, growing up in West Virginia, you saw what was really a more fundamentalist expression of Christianity. There were people that handled snakes. That was something that was part of Christianity, at least for some people in West Virginia. And you had people like faith healers and things like that. And so my parents really saw Christianity as being something that uneducated, unsophisticated people held to, and that kind of had an impression upon me, but yet I really, in some respects, envied my friends who were Christians because they were part of this community. You could tell at school that they had these friendships with other classmates, and that friendship was born out of the fact that they went to church together, they were part of the same youth group together, that they had these experiences together that really knit them. And so I felt a little envious and felt a little bit like an outsider. I just don’t have that real sense of community. But I can remember, in college, having friends that were Christians, and they would share their faith with me, and I would just think, “I just don’t know how you can believe these types of things.” At that time, I was taking courses in science and chemistry and biology, and through the courses particularly that I had in biology, that really in many respects, fostered a position of agnosticism. I wasn’t really sure that God existed, because the grand claim in biology is that everything can be explained through evolutionary mechanisms. And if biology can be fully accounted through by mechanism, then what role is there for a creator to play? A creator becomes superfluous. And many of the professors I had, particularly biology professors, were really… Again, teaching biology in the Bible Belt, a lot of their students would challenge them on the issue of creation and evolution, and I think they had just had it with that. And so they had a very negative perspective on Christianity as well. So I felt very comfortable calling myself an agnostic. I don’t know that I ever would have said I was an atheist per se, but I was really uncertain about God’s existence. So you, I guess, became comfortable in that scientific way of thinking, that you associated yourself with those who were intellectually astute, that evolution could explain the reality of what we’re seeing, at least in the biological world in terms of mechanism.  Did you, by chance—when you embraced this kind of godless reality, did you consider that naturalistic worldview? Or at least I know you were agnostic. But did you follow that worldview through beyond say biological implications, say with regard to your life. Or even question it in terms of the origin of life? Not just the mechanism of biology. Yes, I think I probably limited it primarily to the way I thought about things scientifically. Science is such an alluring drug, and it’s so much fun to investigate problems and to learn about nature and investigate problems in nature that in and of itself, it becomes an obsession. And so that’s—as an undergraduate student, I began dreaming about going to graduate school and earning a PhD in biochemistry and really pursuing a career. So all I thought about was, “How do I learn as much as I can about the sciences?” My parents—even though my mom was a nonpracticing Catholic, she was a very moral person. My father was a very moral person. So I had a very strong moral upbringing. So I wouldn’t say that I held to a kind of a Christian worldview in terms of my morality and ethics exclusively, but I would have considered myself to be a fairly moral person, understood that there was right and wrong, but I just never thought about things more deeply from a religious perspective than that. So as you were moving along in your academics and pursuing science, and it sounds like you were very engrossed in that world, did it just confirm more and more kind of an anti-God sentiment in terms of your understanding of the world and reality?  Yeah, I think so. By the time I went to graduate school, I had no interest in the God question whatsoever. To me, it was, “Science is the answer to our problems as human beings,” and that as a scientist, I could participate in, not only uncovering the secrets of nature, but doing things that would dramatically impact people’s lives. It sounds like that actually gave you a lot of meaning and purpose and ambition, in a sense. As you were moving along and setting really at high, very elite levels of academia and pursuing these questions, was there anything that caused you to sit back and think, “This is hard to explain from a purely naturalistic perspective?”  Yeah, it was really in graduate school, in the first year of graduate school, where that question kind of surfaced. And as I was learning about biochemical systems, it was just so much fun to be a graduate student, because I was surrounded by professors. I was in a smaller chemistry department, so I had access to almost all the faculty. And so it was just a lot of fun to talk with the different faculty to get their perspective on things, to learn about their research, to engage other graduate students, to take advanced coursework. I started reading the scientific literature, began to do my own research. And in that environment, it was again just absolutely thrilling. But what was remarkable is how all of us just marveled at the nature of biochemical systems. It was not unusual for all of us to say, “Look at how amazing this is!” “Look at how cool this is!” “I can’t believe it works this way.” There’s just an elegance and an ingenuity to biochemical systems. And I began to wonder, “Gosh, how on earth do we account for the origin of these systems?” And I knew from an undergraduate that was the origin of life question. And so now I’m a graduate student. It’s like, “Okay, I’ve got the wherewithal to really dig into this.” I’m going to, on my own time, study the origin of life problem. It wasn’t really required in the coursework. And through that investigation, I very quickly came to the recognition that these processes that people are speculating could generate biochemical systems seem woefully inadequate to me. It just doesn’t seem like chemistry and physics could produce these kinds of systems, because I had enough experience as a chemist to know how hard it is to get chemicals to do what you want them to do under carefully controlled conditions in a laboratory setting. To think that somehow molecules that are far more complex than anything that a chemist could ever dream of producing in the lab could just simply emerge through chemical evolution just seemed to me to be far fetched. And so it was at that point that I reached the conclusion there has to be a mind behind everything, that at least when it comes to the origin of life and the origin of biochemical systems, there had to be a higher intelligence that brought those systems into existence. Now, once those systems are in existence, I reasoned at that point that evolutionary processes could have explained the history of life. But to me, at least with respect to the origin of life, there had to be some kind of creator that was responsible. At that point, did you, in terms of who or what that creator or that mind was, did you do any further investigation in terms of trying to identify more who or what that transcendent source was? Or did you just kind of accept that and then move forward?  Well, for me, at least, when I realized that there was a creator, then the question became, “Who is that creator? And how do I relate to that creator?” And I became very interested in that question. I didn’t really have the tools to properly engage that question. I had no training, theologically or philosophically, of any sorts. And so I began just on my own to reason through, who could this creator be? And so I began going down a path of universalism where I thought, “Well, maybe this creator revealed himself to the different people of the world in different ways and that the different religious systems of the world really represent this creator reaching out to people.” And when you look at the moral teachings of the world’s religions, there’s quite a bit of common ground. I was, again, theologically and philosophically naive, because the different religions of the world teach very different things about the nature of reality and the nature of God and the nature of the Person of Christ, but at that point in time, I just didn’t have the sophistication to appreciate that. But also, I think part of my exposure to Islam played a role as well, because in Islam, Muhammad is considered the seal of the prophets.  Muslims view Adam and Noah and Abraham and David and Moses and Jesus as being prophets to particular people at particular times. And so there’s a type of universality to Islam. There’s a type of religious pluralism embedded in Islamic theology. And so I’m sure that some of that was influencing the way I thought about things. I also saw really Islam, and I was exposed to Catholicism, and so here are two expressions of religions that I saw growing up, and so who has to necessarily choose one or the other? Why couldn’t they all be true? So I was going down that particular path. And what really changed my way of thinking was my wife-to-be’s conversion, my fiance’s conversion to Christianity. She grew up in a Christian home, and she dedicated her life to Christ as a teenager and then kind of drifted away from her faith. And then her mom had a friend who was going to a small Pentecostal church in downtown Charleston, West Virginia, and invited Amy’s mother to go to church. And she really liked that experience. And so they both invited Amy to go to church on Easter, and Amy went and rededicated her life to Christ, and so she began to share her faith with me. And what did you think of that? I guess at that point you were somewhat open to the possibility of God, or a personal God, perhaps a Christian God.  Yeah. I remember when Amy told me that she had become a Christian or rededicated her life to Christ. I remember saying, “Hey, this is wonderful if that’s what you want to do. I just don’t think I can be a Christian because I’m a scientist.” And I don’t know where I got that mindset from, other than probably just the experiences I had growing up and the way I saw Christianity expressed. But I felt like I was being very generous because I saw the example of my parents. And so I thought, “Look, if this is something you want to do, I’m fully supportive. It’s just not for me.” And she had a bit of a crisis. She was again at this small church and was really just growing enormously as a Christian. It was at a Bible study where the topic of being unequally yoked with a nonbeliever came up. And we later learned that her pastor, Johnny Withrow, deliberately was teaching on that lesson, but he was actually directing the lesson towards somebody else, not towards Amy. But she’s the one that actually took that message to heart. And so she was like, “What do I do?” And so I became the prayer project for this church, and we were going to be married in a couple of months, and we had the date for our wedding set, and she was like, “What do I do?” And so the whole church was praying for us. And I remember Amy telling me, “Well, Johnny wants to meet with you because we want to talk about the wedding plans. And I can remember saying something really idiotic. Like, “Whatever you guys decide to do for the wedding, I’m fine with. Just tell me when to show up.” Right, right.  So, you know, being married now for 35 years, I know just how moronic that was. But anyway—my poor wife, what she’s gone through. So she insisted. And I thought, “Well, I’ll go ahead, and I’ll meet with Johnny.” And I was just bracing myself for the sales pitch. I knew what was coming. And so, to Johnny’s credit, what he did is he basically challenged me in saying, “Have you ever read the Bible?” And apart from reading Genesis 1, I’d never read the Bible. And he said, “Well, how do you know it’s not true?” And I thought, “You know, you really have a point here.” And he really appealed to my pride as a scientist, saying, “Look, if you’re a scientist, you should be open to investigating truth claims no matter where they come from.” And so I thought, “Well, my wife to be is a Christian. Johnny’s making a good point.” So I got a copy of the Bible, and I would sit in the chemistry lab after I finished my work for the day when everybody else had gone home, and I didn’t want anybody to see me reading the Bible. And I’d sit at the lab bench, and I’d start reading through the Bible. And I can remember complaining to Amy. “I just don’t really know where to start. I’m having some trouble here.” And she said, “Well, start with the gospel of John.” And I ended up not understanding exactly what she meant, so I started with the gospel of Matthew. And what was intriguing to me is like, “Oh, this is where the Christmas story comes from.” Growing up in a non-Christian home and being exposed to the Christmas story, it’s like, “Oh, this is intriguing. So now I understand where the story comes from.” And then I remember reading the Sermon on the Mount, and that was an incredibly powerful passage of scripture for me at that time, and it still is, because here I’m introduced to the person of Christ and His teachings, and I realize that this is the way that I want to live, that what Christ is teaching here is true. I found the person of Christ very winsome, and at the same time, I was being condemned by what Christ was teaching. And I had this desire to please Jesus that was really odd to me. And along the way, one of Johnny’s friends gave me a little booklet on how to become a Christian. And so I realized that there’s no way I could live up to the standards of Christ. But I wanted to. And I wouldn’t have had the words for it at that time, but I was really confronted with my sin. So there’s this little booklet on how do you become a Christian that kind of took me through the gospel. And going through that book, I prayed to receive Christ, but through the process of… really that evening, I remember reading again the Sermon on the Mount. I had this… I would call it a religious experience, where it felt like there was a person in the room with me while I was really contemplating what the Sermon on the Mount meant. And I had this overwhelming sense that this was true. And I’ve never had an experience like that before. I never had an experience like that afterwards. And so I would just say that it was an encounter that I had with the resurrected Christ. That that was part of that process of really drawing me towards Jesus. But the stage was set with seeing God revealed in science and then really, I’m sure, the prayers of people that were praying on my behalf. I found out later that my wife, if I didn’t convert, was going to call off the wedding. She was really that convinced, but she never said that to me. It was just this was her personal conviction, and so God faithfully honored her prayers. That’s amazing! Yeah. There are a few things that stand out there to me that beg a few questions, especially knowing your intellect, your dedication as a scientist, your former reading of the Quran as a form of holy text, and then looking at the Bible. I’m sure there are a lot of differences there. But the first thing I wanted to ask, in a sense, is, when you opened the Bible for the first time—of course you’d have had some kind of esoteric reference there with the Quran—the Bible or the biblical narrative in Matthew, I’m sure, felt quite different as a story. But also embedded in those stories are supernatural presumptions and actions and activities. And I know at this point it sounds like you were open to perhaps the person of God, whoever that was. So, when you read the Scripture for the first time, did you push back on what seemed to be the miraculous? Or did that seem like, “All the pieces are fitting into place. It makes sense to me. If a supernatural being exists, the miraculous can happen.”  Yeah. I don’t think I was ever troubled with the presentation of the miraculous. In some respects, I expected that to be the case, that if indeed there really is a Creator, that there was room for miracles. And one of the things that really struck me immediately, reading the Bible, as you alluded to, Jana, compared to the Quran, is that it was written as if… Here’s a narrative. It was written as if this was history, as if this really happened, that you could follow. There was a logic. There was an ordering to what was being presented that made sense, that I could track with, that I could understand. And even the culmination of Christ’s teaching at the Sermon on the Mount is part of the narrative. The teaching is incorporated into the narrative. And so I felt like I was part of a story. And I understood what was going on. I understood what was being communicated, which was not the case when I was reading from the Quran. And another thought that occurred to me is that you opened the Bible as a curious investigator, as an honest scientist would do, right? You’re willing to open and look at the evidence and see where the evidence leads. And it led you to the truth in the person of Christ, which I agree, He can be an amazingly compelling character, especially when you’re not expecting what you find in scripture. I can also hear a skeptic whispering in my ear, saying, “Well, how much investigation did he really do? He opened the Bible. He had an experience of Christ. He was overwhelmed by the teaching and the person of Christ, which sometimes is enough.” If that’s a real experience, it’s not, I think, in a sense, that you’re just not looking for truth, which it is, but also the reality. And Jesus showing up in a very palpable way, I’m sure, was incredibly convincing for you, evidentiary almost in a sense, that His presence was enough to convince you, in a sense, all of those things put together. So I wonder how you would answer the skeptic to say, “Well, you didn’t investigate for very long.”  I guess I would say yes and no to that question in terms of how long did I investigate. To respond to the skeptic. Gosh, I think it was in the summer of 1999, Michael Shermer, who heads up The Skeptics Society, located in Pasadena, California, wrote a book on… How We Believe, I think is the title of the book. And he and a sociologist by the name of Frank Sulloway interviewed people and asked them why they believe. And the two reasons were, number one, seeing design in nature, and number two reason was experiencing God. And so I would say that my conversion essentially involved both of those facets. I wasn’t looking for God. I wasn’t looking for a crutch. I discovered God in the design of biochemical systems. And so the question was really who is God? And to me, the encounter I had with Christ really drove home who God is. And so Jesus is indeed God incarnate. So it was that experience. But I think experiencing God is as much evidential as actually seeing the elegant structure of a biochemical system or a biomolecule. And the thing is that, as a scientist, you have a theory. You have data that seems to support the theory. Your work isn’t done. You continue to devise experiments and observations to interrogate that theory, to determine whether that theory continues to withstand ongoing scrutiny. And so, for the 35 years I’ve been a Christian, I’ve continued to challenge my conversion, if you will. I continue to study biochemistry and see even more and more evidence for design. In fact, I’ve worked hard to develop design arguments based on the latest advances in biochemistry, as a way to formalize that intuition of design that I had. I continue to study the origin of life question and seeing more and more intractable problems emerge over the 35 years that I’ve been investigating. I have, since then, learned about the historical argument for the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the arguments that are made for the reliability of the Old and the New Testaments, learned about archaeological evidence that supports both the Old and the New Testaments, and even have studied things like the argument from religious experience for God’s existence. Richard Swinburne is somebody, a philosopher at, I think, Oxford that developed this argument. So you can even take religious experience, and actually, by looking at the shared experience that Christians have had for 2000 years, construct an argument for God’s existence. And so I’ve continued to challenge my conversion in a sense, and I’m more convinced now than ever. And so the investigation continued, and still continues to this very day, where I am not afraid to look at challenges from skeptics that would challenge God’s existence or challenge the God of the Bible as being the explanation for who the Creator is. I think that’s a really excellent answer. I think it’s an honest answer. Again, as someone who takes objective truth seriously, who is constantly testing hypotheses and coming to conclusions based upon what you observe and see. I am also encouraged in a sense that you look not only at the biological mechanisms, your field of expertise, but you’re willing to look at reality in a grand way, in a sense, and look at the whole picture with regard to reality. It sounds as if, the more that you have studied, the more that you can see how science and belief in God really coalesce. That they’re not enemies you kind of had the presumption early in your life that you can’t study science or be a scientist and have faith in God or believe in God. How would you answer that skeptic?  Yeah. Well, one of the things that is interesting about Christianity is that God invites us to test, to test our faith. And there’s this idea that somehow faith is just blind belief in what you hope to be true. But from a biblical perspective, faith is really about looking at evidence and then acting on the evidence that’s in front of you. And so, when you look at the stories in Scripture, people are experiencing God, and then are being asked, as a result of that experience, to then put faith in God. And ultimately that’s what Jesus is asking us with respect to faith. It’s that here’s everything about Me, right? And now do you trust in Me as the way for your salvation? So faith is not something that we blindly hope is true, but it really is something that has an evidential component to it. But yet at some point we have to exercise the act of trust, in light of what the evidence is telling us. And in some respects, that’s true about science, is that we’re using evidence to evaluate theoretical ideas, but we also are making certain assumptions about the nature of reality as we gather that evidence and then draw conclusions from it. But then, once you have a theory in place, you are then acting on faith to determine if that theory is indeed valid. So you make predictions about what you think will be discovered in the future, and then you operate accordingly. So there’s a faith element in the same way in science as you do see, I think, in the Christian faith. But the Scripture also tells us, too, that God is revealed to us through the record of nature. And not only can we see evidence for God’s fingerprints according to Scripture, but even ascertain God’s character. And so you would expect, then, if science is really about investigating the world of nature, that science should actually uncover pointers to God, should reveal to us about the reality of God. When you look at the creation accounts in Scripture, many of them are presented as a divine natural history. And so there are elements of that that are also testable as well. And so this idea of testing is really very much part of the Christian faith, and scripture kind of invites you. It presents things in ways that invite predictions and invite testing. I think that’s a really helpful way for us to think about things. As Christians, I think there is sometimes a presumption that you ‘just believe’ and that you don’t need to continue to affirm the person of God through scientific investigation or testing – whether it’s looking at the biblical text or looking at the archaeological record or all these many things that you do to look at Scripture and hold things up and test them and hold on to the things that are good, But also what I love about it is that you’re not afraid to question. So that you’re continually led more closely to truth, whatever that is. And it seems to me that, after 35 years, you hold a pretty solid belief, that what you believe in terms of God and Christianity is true. That’s so encouraging. I’m sure Amy was incredibly excited when you came to faith in Christ and the wedding could proceed, and that you actually have a household of unity in terms of your religious belief and your faith and what you pass on to your children.  Yeah. My wife always says the way our stories intersected is really a testament to God’s faithfulness. And I would agree with that, yeah. I mean, in retrospect, there are just so many pointers to and signposts that I see where God was at work, in retrospect. Even having a friend in college who was a Christian, father was a Methodist minister, and he and I having conversations about, “How do we make sense of Genesis 1 in light of modern science?” And he and I having those kind of conversations and asking questions. ‘Was Jesus haploid or diploid?’ And things like that. But those are all conversations that were putting stepping stones in front of me along the way. It’s really wonderful how you can look back and actually see God’s hand in your life even when you really didn’t know what it was at the time, but you can recognize it in hindsight. That’s really amazing. Before we go on to the advice that I’m going to ask of you for skeptics and Christians, is there anything else to add to your story that you think that we’ve missed or anything you’d like to include?  No. Other than, I guess to me, as a scientist, there is nothing more gratifying than learning how something works in nature and just seeing again God’s fingerprints in that process. I see myself as a scientist, as much as a worship leader, as anything else, where I get to see God revealed in nature in ways that I think a layperson wouldn’t necessarily see.  But then trying to communicate that to laypeople is a lot of fun. And it’s exciting when laypeople get a glimpse of just the majesty of the Creator through what He’s made. It’s very exciting. And so I just see myself as much as a worship leader as anything else, as a scientist and a person of faith. That’s beautiful. Yeah. The heavens do declare the glory of His handiwork. It is kind of interesting to me how even the most atheist among us, like Richard Dawkins or even Lawrence Krauss, who will declare the magic or the wonder of the cosmos or the things that they’re observing. They just have no place to put it. But as a Christian, you can look at the wonder and the complexity and the beauty and the elegance, I think is the word that you used, of what you see in the cell and just go, “Well, there’s a reason for that.” There was a mind, and it all makes sense. The pieces come together because it is a comprehensive and true worldview. That’s really wonderful, I’m sure.  Before we get to the advice, I do want our listeners to know a little bit of the writing that you’ve done. Could you just mention very briefly about some of the books that you’ve written, so they have a sense of your scope of expertise?  Yeah, well, I’ve written four books dealing with the origin of life question and the design of biochemical systems. So one book is cleverly titled Origins of Life. One is The Cell’s Design, where I look at the nature of biochemical systems and present kind of a revitalized watchmaker argument for God’s existence. I’ve got a book called Creating Life in the Lab, which was a lot of fun to work on. And it’s about the work in synthetic biology, where scientists are literally trying to create cells in the lab and kind of presenting an argument that I’d call an empirical argument for God’s existence, basically showing how intelligent agency is critical in order to convert molecules into cell-like entities. And if that’s the case, then by analogy, that should be true when it comes to the origin of life. And just have a book released about a year ago now called Fit for a Purpose, which is presenting another type of design argument from biochemistry. And I’m also very much interested in the question of human origins. To me, I think, in the science/faith conversation there’s no area that has more implications than really how we understand our origins as human beings. And so I’ve got a book called Who Was Adam? that I wrote looking at the scientific evidence dealing with human origins and how to integrate that with the biblical account of human origins, where we show that there’s really a strong scientific case that can be made that human beings bear God’s image, as scripture describes. And then also interested in kind of the future of science and technology, so I wrote a book called Humans 2.0 that deals with the idea of using technology to modify our biological makeup and to try to create post-human species, where many people view human beings now as being in control of evolution. And so I look at the advances that are happening in transhumanism and really discuss what does it mean from a Christian worldview perspective for transhumanism to be gaining momentum, and how does the gospel intersect with transhumanist thinking? And I’m currently working on a book called Should We Play God?, which would be kind of a sequel to Humans 2.0, as well as a sequel to Creating Life in the Lab, and it’s looking at advances in synthetic biology and our ability to create artificial organisms in a laboratory. And how should we think about that from a Christian perspective, where I’m developing a theology for synthetic biology and biotechnology using the kind of the grand narrative of Christianity, creation, fall, redemption, and consummation, as being the framework. And how do these different areas of Christian theology speak to our efforts to create artificial life forms? And how can we produce a robust theology that gives us a framework to think about these kind of advances? And really addressing the question, should we play God? That’s a great question. Yeah. And wow! Thank you for that little summary. It sounds jam packed with fascinating work. I hope our listeners will take advantage and start to read some of your resources, if they haven’t already. As we’re wrapping up, Fuz, and thinking about those who are perhaps skeptics, maybe they’re open, perhaps they’re agnostic but open to the possibility of God or a mind or something that’s bigger than themselves, bigger than mechanical systems. How would you advise someone like that to consider in a serious way the possibility of God?  Yeah. I guess I would ask the question: How open minded are you to the reality of God’s existence? Because, from astronomy, we’ve got this recognition that the universe has a beginning, that there’s design in the universe. This is the fine tuning of the fundamental constants. We see design in biology. The origin of life is a scientific mystery. We don’t really know how life originates. And so nobody disputes there’s design in the universe, there’s design in biology. Nobody disputes that, when it comes to the question of origins, there seems to be something that is beyond our capacity to explain the universe or explain life. And in my experience, many skeptics will look to any kind of potential natural process explanation and would prefer that compared to, I think, the obvious possibility that there is a God that’s behind everything. And so really, my question is, how open minded are you to what the evidence is really saying? Are you truly open minded or would you prefer a natural process explanation? And if that’s the case, why is that the case? Why do you prefer that explanation? So those would really be the questions I would have. But I think if one is really open minded, again, the evidence really points strongly in the direction of Christian theism. And yet there are still outstanding problems: The problem of evil. What’s now being called the hiddenness of God problem. And these are challenges and problems that Christians and nonbelievers alike wrestle with, right? And I wouldn’t minimize the severity or the significance of those problems, but there’s ultimately answers. There’s intellectual answers to those problems. But ultimately the most satisfying answer to these challenges is actually the person of Christ. It’s only through the person of Christ can you make any kind of sense or have any kind of meaning in suffering. It’s only in the person of Christ that you find hope in the midst of suffering. And it’s in the person of Christ that you realize that God isn’t hidden from us. Though we might think that to be the case, God isn’t hidden from us but is fully revealed to us. And so to me, even the most significant challenges to Christian theism, or at least what many people think are significant challenges, really are in a sense, taking us to the very heart of the gospel itself. And the only satisfying explanation to those two challenges is the person of Christ, ultimately. So even when superficially the evidence seems to go against Christianity, when you think more deeply about it, it really brings to life the gospel itself. Yes. You’ll often hear people say, “Well, there’s no evidence for God.” I guess that particular statement, I would imagine, would answer your first question: How open are you really? And then, I guess, trying to peel back the onions. Why are you so closed off? But that’s another issue, probably for another day, because that can be very difficult. But that is very wise. I love the way that you pulled all of that together.  And for the Christian who wants to engage with someone who is very skeptical but perhaps open, how would you best encourage Christians to share the gospel or provide evidence, or how would you suggest that they go about that?  I think the first thing that we have to do is recognize that, regardless of a person’s worldview and whether their worldview is something that we would share, we have to recognize that they are image bearers and that they have infinite worth and value, that they are sacred, and that our greatest obligation towards those people is to love them. And anything we do as we engage nonbelievers has to be ultimately shaped by our genuine love for them. If we can’t say that we genuinely love that person, we probably shouldn’t try to present the gospel to them. But when people know that you genuinely love them and that you accept them regardless of their perspective, that goes a long way, I think, towards really building genuine bridges with other people. And then to have honest conversations with them about their doubts. Not to judge them. Not to necessarily pepper them with evidence. But really answer and engage their questions and engage them sincerely. And be aware of what kind of resources are available that you can point people to who do have questions if you yourself aren’t versed in those questions. But ultimately I don’t think you can ever argue somebody into the kingdom of God. But I think you can love people, and through that love, they’ll experience the love of Christ. And that will, I think, open them up to evidences and soften their heart towards evidences, if that’s what they need. Yeah. I don’t think we can hear that enough. I mean, if the person of Christ is the personification of love, and we are His representatives, it is something that we should be able to do well, right? They’ll know that we’re Christians by our love. And I do appreciate you reminding us of that because I think sometimes, especially, we get carried away with all of the intellect and the rationality and the evidences of it. But sometimes we miss the most important thing, and that is seeing others as image bearers, as you say, and made in the image of God’s love by God’s love. And we want to love in the way that He’s called us to. So thank you for that reminder.  Fuz, This has been an amazing time together. I just feel like I’ve learned so much, and I’m very inspired by your story. I do appreciate you coming on today, as just a representative of someone who is not only brilliant, but obviously you have a heart for the Lord and for others. So thank you for showing that to us today and sharing your story.  I’m glad to do it. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a privilege to be with you. Wonderful. Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Dr. Fuz Rana’s story. You can hear more about his speaking and all of the wonderful books he mentioned, as well as the ministry, Reasons to Believe, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this podcast, you can always contact me through our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share our podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.