Dr. Sy Garte, a biochemist, was raised as a communist and militant atheist. He began to question his naturalistic worldview as he began to see the limits of science as the best explanation for the origin of life and other conundrums. It opened him to the possibility of God. Dr. Garte’s website: https://sygarte.com/ To hear more stories of atheists 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 but who became a Christian against all odds.  Does science point away or towards the existence of God? Does a science-driven worldview conflict with a biblical worldview? Or does it complement? In other words, are science and God friends or foes? Is belief in science enough to prevent someone from believing in God? After all, some people will reject belief in God because they say they believe in science. They believe what is rational and observable and repeatable and not in a reality beyond the natural universe, which they say there’s no evidence for. Some people think that science is king, that science is the only way to know anything, and that science can and will eventually win the day, will give us answers to the universe. It’s not the stuff of wishful thinking, such as religion. Science and belief in God cannot and do not go together, nor will they ever, or so it is thought.  But what happens when a highly educated scientist devoted to a naturalistic, atheistic view of the world begins to experience the limitations of science? That it is not as capable of answering all the questions he once thought it would. Especially regarding three of the biggest questions there are: How the universe began from nothing, how life began from non-life, and how humans became so exceptional in their capacity as compared to the rest of the biological world. These conundrums were the door openers to consider the possibility of something more than the natural world as a viable explanation. These, in addition to some other very surprising events in his life.  Today’s guest, Dr. Sy Garte, holds a PhD in biochemistry, was once a strong anti-theist from generations of militant atheists who long resisted the possibility, much less the probability of God, but today he writes and speaks clearly and boldly on his convinced view and the reality of a personal and powerful God and the truth of Christianity. He sees how science and faith work together well as mutually reinforcing. I hope you’ll come along to hear his journey. I hope you’ll also stay to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching for truth and for God, as well as advice to Christians on how best to engage with those who don’t believe.  Welcome to Side B Stories, Dr. Garte. It’s so great to have you with me today!  It’s great to be here, thanks. So our listeners know a little bit about you before we get into your story, why don’t you tell us a little bit about perhaps your credentialing, where you live, a little bit of your life now?  Sure. I’m a PhD. I have a PhD in biochemistry. I’m a retired scientist. I worked in academia for about thirty years as a professor at several universities. Then I worked at the NIH for a few years as an administrator. And now I’m retired. And I’ve been devoting my life since then to Christianity in terms of its relationship to science. I’ve written a book, and I feel that my mission, my call at this point, is to talk about my own life in the sense that it was science that helped bring me to faith. I started out life as an atheist. I grew up in a very atheistic family, three generations of atheists and communists, and at some point, I began to question that, and that was largely through science, and then eventually came to Christ, got baptized, and I’m now an active member of my church. Okay, wow! Yeah. It sounds like there’s a lot there, and a lot of ground to cover. I mean, not only your wonderful credentialing, as you’ve highlighted, PhD in biochemistry, I believe. So we’re going to walk through all of that. Let’s start back in your childhood. You said you are from generations of atheism, militant atheism. Let’s start there in your home. As you were growing up, tell me about the home that you grew up in, their view of God, their view of all things religious. Why don’t you start us there?  Sure. Well, it’s actually fairly simple because the view of God in my house was that there’s no possibility that anything like a God could exist. My parents were, as I mentioned briefly, they were both members of the American Communist Party in the 1930s, and that included a very militant atheism and anti-religious view. Their view, which was the Marxist view, is that religion is an evil thing. God is impossible, could not possibly exist. My father was a chemist and a very strong materialist. He only believed in anything that was materialistically and scientifically demonstrable, and so for him, the whole idea of anything with spirituality or religious connotations was complete nonsense. My mother was even a stronger atheist in a philosophical sense. And she also was a very strong communist, and again, atheism is part of the communist dogma, so that’s how I grew up. I grew up not even thinking about God. I just thought it was ridiculous and nonsense and couldn’t be true. And yeah. There was no discussion of it. We didn’t celebrate any holidays of any kind. We gave each other presents on New Year’s because that’s what they do in the Soviet Union. They don’t celebrate Christmas. So New Year’s Day was the holiday, and that’s when we exchanged presents. So I would say a pretty extreme atheism. And it’s very interesting, by the way… I may just mention this, too, Jana, that, whenever I speak about this, and I look at the comments, I get a lot of comments that say, “He was never really an atheist, because atheists never convert to Christianity.” That’s apparently a statement of belief in the atheist faith. And so people keep denying, that I was ever an atheist, and I don’t see how I could’ve been more of an atheist than I was. It wasn’t even an issue. Yeah. I would imagine growing up in that household, where it’s not only just a strong presumption, it sounded like there was real active movement against all things religious. Of course, if you have a Marxist view of the world, religion is… I guess it’s an opiate for the masses- It’s evil. And it is something to be gotten rid of, right? It’s something that is not only for those who are ignorant, as it were, and superstitious, but it’s bad, it’s evil. What did you think religion was? Other than, you know, these negative characteristics of it. Was it mythology? Was it social construction? How did you all view it? Did you think of it in those terms? Well, I think you actually hit it when you said opium for the masses. The idea was that religion was a tool of the ruling class to enslave and control the ignorant masses. I mean that’s pretty much word for word what I learned, when I began listening to Martin Luther King, who besides being a major leader of the Civil Rights Movement was also a very strong Christian and a brilliant man and an incredible speaker. And it didn’t make sense, just this whole idea that religion is something for people who are not very bright and get easily fooled and it’s oppressive. It didn’t hold together. And needless to say, I dropped my communism pretty early, much before I dropped the atheism part, but the whole left wing agenda started to fall apart for me based on some of these things. Okay. So you, over time, left your communism behind, but you still embraced atheism. Now it’s interesting you say that sometimes you get accused of not ever having been an atheist, and I’ve seen that before as well, in terms of a lot of people who present themselves as former atheists, and yet they’re accused of not ever having been an atheist, so just for clarity, how would you define atheism, and what your perspective was at that point. Because I know, even now, people define atheism in different ways.  They certainly do. That’s a big topic. Yeah.  Many atheists claim that atheism is simply not being convinced that any gods exist. When I hear that, my first approach is to say, “Well, if that’s all atheism is, why are you on YouTube? Why do you have an Atheist Experience radio show, where you spend most of your life attacking religion if all it is something you’re not sure exists?” I mean, I don’t go on the radio, or I don’t go on YouTube, and say, “I don’t believe in unicorns, and I’m going to prove they don’t exist, and nobody can convince me.” Why waste your time on something you don’t think is real? I think the real definition of atheism, especially the New Atheism which is now very prevalent and very successful, is not at all simply, “I don’t believe God exists.” I got to that stage after I left the communist idea that religion is purely evil and has to be fought against. Then I got to the point where I just didn’t care. I didn’t believe in God, but I didn’t tell anybody. I never talked about it. And it wasn’t something of any interest. And the reality of New Atheism is it is pretty much a religion, because they are not just saying, “Well, try to convince me.” They’re claiming that there is no God and that all the evidence we have, and there’s so much of it, both scientific, historical, all of that evidence, to them, is meaningless. They reject it because they want to reject it. Because it goes against their religious views. Their religious views are not simply that they don’t believe that there’s a God. Their religious view is, “There is no God. God does not exist. There is no spirituality. There is no supernatural. There is no free will. There is no significance or meaning to life, other than the fact that you’re alive, and that science can explain everything, everything, including who you love and why, and every question that comes out is a matter for scientific investigation.” These are religious beliefs. They’re not scientific beliefs. Scientists don’t believe in scientism, which is the idea that everything can be explained by science. The only people who believe in scientism are religious atheists. So as an atheist yourself, if you can put yourself back in those shoes, looking back, would you say that you were in some ways a religious atheist? Did you have arguments against God? Or did you just merely presume the perspective because of your parents? That’s a loaded question. Or did you actually have evidence on your side or arguments for why God did not exist?  Yeah. I think the answer is that I started that way. The evidence that I had, of course, was all negative. I would claim, if asked. I didn’t trumpet this very much because, when I was a child, there were very few atheists around. So I didn’t really talk about it much. I probably would have been beaten up if I had. But if I had been speaking to someone else, I would have said, “Well, everything that we don’t understand can be explained by science. There’s no need for a god. And science disproves the supernatural.” None of which is true, but that’s what I thought. But once I dropped the religious part of that, which really was related to the communism, as I mentioned, I entered a phase, and I’d say this was probably when I was in college, where I was simply not… I was like today’s “Nones.” I just didn’t have any religion. I didn’t care about it, didn’t think about it, in fact, I actually had a girlfriend when I was a teenager who was a Christian, and I didn’t realize it. She didn’t tell me. And she did bring me to see the film The Gospel According to Matthew, that was my first experience, when I watched that film, of feeling that maybe there’s something here after all. And the reason for that is because there was a very emotional scene of the resurrection, when the empty tomb is discovered, and the music, the background music in the scene of this movie… And in the scene, the music goes from a very depressing funeral march to an incredibly beautiful, uplifting African hymn called Missa Luba, and that instant where the music changes is the instant when the stone is rolled back and the Marys look up and see the empty tomb, and I had this amazing feeling for the first time in my life of witnessing the miraculous. And I didn’t even believe at that time that that was possible. And about five minutes later I told myself that that was just an illusion, it was brought on by the emotional effect of the music, and it wasn’t real. But I now know that it was real. It was the first time the Holy Spirit came to me and said, “Um, you’re missing something. Here it is.” But at the time I didn’t want to believe it. And so I continued with that for many years, just if people asked me what was my religion, I would have said, “Nothing. I’m an atheist.” But I would never have argued. I didn’t care about it. It wasn’t something that I thought about. It wasn’t a religious view, it was simply a lack of a view. And I think that many atheists today who share that kind of atheism. They’re sometimes called LackTheists. They just simply don’t believe in God, and they don’t care about it. But that’s not the New Atheism. The New Atheism is much more like my original atheism, where people have slogans like, “Empty the pews.” They talk about religion being an evil influence. They talk about trying to defend freedom from religious attack. All kinds of things. And they have specific views which are religious views. And I mentioned them a few minutes ago: Not believing in free will, not believing in the significance of humanity. All kinds of things. The idea that we live on a very tiny, insignificant planet, that there are probably millions of other intelligent beings. All of these ideas which they claim are scientific are actually not. They are religious. In some ways, too, they are implications of the atheistic or naturalistic worldview. That is, you are, in a way, forced to believe in determinism if you are a pure naturalist and the world and nature is all that exists, or your significance is… Well, it’s not grounded. The exceptionality of humanity is not grounded in the naturalistic worldview. So in your life, like you said, you kind of moved from a more, I guess, enthusiastic atheism to a more apathetic atheism, but in that period of time, did you ever feel like your views, your atheistic worldview, affected your life? Did you ever think, “Okay, I actually don’t have free will in my choices. There actually isn’t objective moral good or evil.” Those kinds of things. Did that ever come to roost, as it were, in your life? Or were those just kind of intellectual concepts that came along with your atheistic worldview?  You know, that’s a very good question because, although I didn’t feel the kinds of things you’re talking about, I definitely did feel that something was missing in my life. I didn’t know what it was. By this time, I was studying science very intently, first in college and then in graduate school. And I loved science. And I even felt at a certain point that science was providing whatever it was that was missing. I didn’t have a name for then, but now I know it was spirituality. I think human beings need something spiritual in their lives, especially as they get a little older, get married, have children, begin to live a life that’s complicated and difficult, and it’s hard to do that without some kind of spirituality. And science was great. I loved it, but it didn’t quite do it completely. And even though science was very fulfilling for me, I still felt a sense of a missing something. I didn’t know what it was. And I think I actually am a very spiritual person and always was, but my upbringing kind of squashed that, and I think I started feeling that that was getting squashed, and it was also at that time that I began learning things in science that were true and also questioned this whole idea of materialism and determinism, and that began really shaking my conviction that there is no god and cannot be a god. I began wondering, “Is that really true? Maybe it’s not.” So walk us through that. That’s a very interesting thought, in that someone who is really pursuing science in very sophisticated ways through your education, graduate education, that you’re very thoughtful about, in a sense, your worldview and what science is able to answer, what doors it opens to understanding the universe, but it sounds like there were some questions you were asking or answers you weren’t receiving or something that was causing you to think, “Is there something more?” Tell us about that.  Well, yeah. I mean it started with quantum physics, which I had to learn as a chemistry major. I started as a chemistry major in college. And we learned all these things, but we learned them as, “This is how things work. This is what it is. There’s something called the Uncertainty Principle, which means you can never know the position and the momentum of an electron at the same time.” And I remember thinking, “You can never know? How is that possible?” But I put it out of my mind. But as I grew older and I began reading and I wasn’t just studying this stuff, I began realizing that there’s an awful lot in modern physics that doesn’t fit with determinism or materialism. Almost all of quantum mechanics, which is undeniably true, is not something that makes any sense in terms of our normal, logical, human way of thinking. It just doesn’t. And nobody says that it does. But what we know is that it’s true. It’s why we’re talking to each other. I mean, it’s the basis of modern technology, so it has to be true. And I didn’t get that. And I started wondering about that. And I’m not a physicist, so I couldn’t go into any detail about it, but it just seemed strange to me. But what I could go into detail was, and what I was learning about biochemistry, about life, and I remember the first time I really went into great depth on some of the biochemical mechanisms for how life works, especially the system that produces proteins from the genetic code, from DNA, RNA, and the genetic code, and that system is just incredibly amazingly ornate and unbelievable. And I was a full atheist, but again, I got chills up and down my spine when I learned this material. I looked around at my classmates, and they were just writing everything down, like I was, but somewhere were in my mind, I was saying, “How did this happen? There’s no way this could have happened by spontaneous, random chance.” I never thought, “This is design. This is God.” And I still don’t know what it is, but it did shake the foundations of my conviction that God isn’t possible. And I began thinking, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe God is not impossible, which means that He is possible,” and at that point, thanks to these scientific issues, and there were many others that came along… There are lots of questions, for example, in science that you just can’t ask because they have no answers. So all of those questions led me to what I call my agnostic phase. I reached a point where I would not have said I was an atheist anymore. If someone said, “Do you believe in God?” I would have said, “I have no idea. I don’t know.” And that phase lasted a very long time. And during that time, I became more open to the possibility of God, and I think that openness allowed me to finally be susceptible to the effects of the Holy Spirit, and that’s when I began to have some dreams and some other experiences, which I now know were the direct action of the Holy Spirit in my life. Well, I’m very curious about this. Because obviously, again, you’re a very intellectually driven, thoughtful critical thinker, you were willing to see the limitations of science and the answers that it can provide, that there were extraordinary things that you were seeing in the universe, from quantum physics to the complicated things that you were finding in the mechanics of biology. It’s not like a nice package with a bow that’s tied up, and science is… Not that it’s not robust. It’s incredibly robust. But perhaps it’s not the end-all in terms of answering every question. I find it interesting that you say that there are some questions that people just don’t even ask because science is, at that point, really incapable of even addressing certain kinds of things.  But you were intellectually honest enough to say, “Okay, maybe there’s something else. Maybe there’s something beyond the physical world, beyond the material world,” that opened you to the possibility of something more, and I just want to kind of appreciate that for a moment and say that that’s very laudable, as compared to perhaps your earlier days, where you would just shut down, like you say so many do, the possibility of something beyond the material world as providing an explanation for what it is that we see and experience in our world.  But now you’ve raised my curiosity because you’re talking about things like openness to the Holy Spirit. And dreams and other experiences. Why don’t you talk us through that? What were some of these extraordinary things that continued moving you in the direction of God?  Well, I’ll be happy to, but first, I just want to say one more thing about this issue of scientism, of the idea that science provides all answers. The first person who ever told me that science only answered some questions and not others was actually my atheist father, who was a scientist. And if you ask any scientist today, “Can science answer all questions?” whether they’re theists or not, they’ll say no. Science is designed to understand the natural world. The world we can see, that’s available to our senses. It’s not designed to address the question of God or the supernatural. There’s no way it can even answer those questions, along with many other questions it can’t answer. So the people now who are saying things like, “Well, science has shown us how everything works. Thunder used to be… People thought that it was Thor. Now we know it’s natural.” Yeah, that’s true. And exactly correct, because that’s what science does. And I’m still a scientist. I have a paper pending now for publication. I published two papers in the last couple of years, even retired. So science is wonderful, but what it does is it answers questions about the natural world, and not all of those questions, either In terms of, yeah, opening up, now at the time that happened, I had no idea that I was opening up. I certainly would have scoffed at the idea of a Holy Spirit, but you know, I mean, it wasn’t up to me. This happened without my willingness. And the first dream happened while I was agnostic, just barely agnostic. It was quite a while ago. And I had no idea what to make of it. I thought it was just a crazy thing. And this was the dream where I was … It was a nightmare where I was holding on by my hands at the edge of a cliff, and I’m afraid of heights, so that was a very terrifying dream, and I didn’t know what to do. And then I heard a voice say, “What’s wrong? Just let go,” or maybe just, “Just let go,” and I thought that was crazy. “If I let go, I’ll fall down,” and I said, “No, I can’t let go.” And the voice was insistent. It kept say, “Just let go.” And so eventually, I didn’t know what else to do. I was losing my grip, anyway, so I let go, and as soon as I let go, the world turned 90 degrees, so instead of hanging off the cliff, I was lying on the ground, with my hands clutching a boulder on the ground, and I was perfectly fine. And there was a man there. And then I woke up. And I had no idea what that was all about. And the man who was there had the voice that I heard. And he was standing not far from me, and I didn’t put it out of my mind, but I had no idea what it was all about. And for a long time I didn’t know what it meant to say, “Just let go.” Let go of what? And obviously something was holding me back, and that was later that was realized that that was the first time the Holy Spirit came to me directly and told me what to do. And it turned out that letting go was exactly what I had to do, of all the garbage that had entered my mind from childhood on, that was blocking me from making any progress towards understanding reality and truth. And when I let go of that, and that doesn’t mean I let go of science. It doesn’t mean I let go of rationality or anything related to intellectual honesty. It meant I let go of all the mythology that I had learned about, the impossibility of God, the evil of religion, all of that garbage I had to let go of. And eventually I did. It took time, but eventually I did. So, like you say, that was early in your agnosticism, so it was a step forward, I guess you could say, in your journey, but you were still pretty far from- Oh, yeah. Quite far. And then I had another one, which was later. So at this point, I had already been to a church for the first time in my life, and I should mention that had an effect on me, too, because I had never walked into a church for the first 46 years of my life. Never been in any religious institution. So I’m just curious. Why did you walk into the church?  Good question. I met a woman, a Christian woman who became a friend of mine, and she was not very evangelical, but she wanted me to go to a church with her. She was Catholic. And I thought the Catholics were the most evil group of people in the world, but I agreed to go with her. I was absolutely terrified. I thought I would be, I don’t know, taunted at best and stoned at worst. Oh, my!  As a sinner and a pawn of Satan. I had no idea what a church was like. And I was completely overwhelmed by the difference, and the reality was that this was a church run by Franciscan monks, and the priest who gave the sermon talked about love and why love is so important. I don’t think he even mentioned God very much, maybe a little bit, but what I heard was very nice, and everybody shook my hand and wished me peace. It was nice. It was nothing bad at all. Nobody looked at me harshly or whispered to each other about this infidel in their midst. And I survived, and that made me really wonder about what I had been taught, whether that was all real or not. Whether the church was the main enemy of humanity or not and eventually I decided not. You know, I think that’s not an uncommon experience. I think that there’s so much negative press, as it were, about the church and so much negative caricaturing that when someone actually goes or encounters it for themselves, it is nothing as they supposed it would be. They’re so surprised, and those negative caricatures fall.  Well, I still hear this. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I still hear this. And I hear of people deconverting because of the horrible experiences they had at church, and I have to tell you, since I’ve become a Christian, I’m a Methodist, but I’ve been to Baptist churches, Southern Baptist churches, Catholic churches, denominational churches, all kinds of churches. I have never seen anything bad in any of them. Maybe I’m just lucky or maybe I’m missing it, but when people start complaining about how badly they were treated, I just haven’t seen that. And a church is where you worship Jesus Christ, right? And there’s nothing bad in that. That’s nothing but love. So anyway, that’s a side issue, but… Yeah. Of course, that’s not to say… A church is made up of people, and certainly people can be very bad representatives of Christ, so I just want to acknowledge that those things do happen.  So you left that church experience with a different impression, again, maybe perhaps a bit more openness towards the possibility [CROSSTALK 40:04].  Yeah. I did. And I started thinking, “Well, maybe I should actually look at that book that they keep talking about,” but I didn’t do it yet. I had another dream, which got me to open the book. Okay.  And that was the one… Where I’m by myself outside of a walled garden, and I know there’s a garden inside. I’m not sure how I know that, but it’s surrounded by this very steep wall which you can’t see over, and I’m circling around it, trying to find the way to climb up, and I can’t climb up, because every time I try, I fall down again. There’s no good handholds or footholds, so I’m getting very frustrated. I’m walking around, and all of a sudden, there’s a man standing there, and he says, “What’s the matter with you? What are you trying to do?” And I said, “I’m trying to get into the garden! There’s a garden there, and I can’t get over the wall.” And he said to me, “Open the door. It’s right there.” So I did. There was a door, I opened it, and I walked in. And by then I knew that that meant something. I knew who the man was, and I knew what the garden was, and at that point, I decided, more or less. I don’t know exactly when, but at that point, I decided it was time to open the book. And I did. I started looking at Bible. I didn’t like the Old Testament much. I didn’t understand it, didn’t know what it was all about. So I went to the New Testament. I had seen that movie as a teenager about Matthew, and I saw there is, in fact, the Gospel of Matthew. So I started with that, and I read that. And I read the Sermon on the Mount, and I almost broke down in tears. Who knew this was in this? For those who don’t know what the Sermon on the Mount is, may not be familiar with the Bible at all, could you tell us a bit about what that is?  Yeah. The Sermon on the Mount, which is in the Gospel of Matthew, is a sermon by Jesus. It’s the longest single passage in the Bible of Jesus’ speaking. And it includes what’s called the Beatitudes, which are a series of sentences that start with, “Blessed are…” and it includes, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” I don’t have it memorized, so hopefully I don’t get anything wrong, but there are many of these blessings of people who are humble, poor, modest, in trouble, suffering, sinful, and that’s who Jesus came for. And I didn’t know that. And then the sermon continues with all kinds of amazing messages that, if you’re not familiar with it, look it up. You can just look at Sermon on the Mount and read it, and for someone like me, who didn’t know what Jesus Christ was all about, it was such an eye opener. Now, I heard it when I saw the movie, but that’s different, and I wasn’t really paying attention, and I was quite young, but when I read it, at that point, then I decided, “Okay, I have to read this whole thing. I have to see what else is going on here.” And I went straight to the book of Acts, which actually is my favorite book in the Bible, and later and I went and read Luke. Luke also wrote the book of Acts, the book of Acts of the Apostles. And that’s a history. It’s a historical treatment of what happened after Jesus Christ rose from the dead, was resurrected. The early church in Jerusalem. Very detailed, who said what, all kinds of things that are obviously not made up. I mean anybody who could make up that is an amazing writer and liar, because it comes across as so honest. I never have doubted anything in that book as being real. And that made me face the key question, which is, “Is it true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead?” because if that’s true, you have to be a Christian. I mean that’s the essence of Christianity. And I saw that, and I said, “Well, I can’t believe that. That’s supernatural. That can’t be real, and also, it’s too good to be true.” If the resurrection is real, and we are saved in Jesus Christ, then that’s wonderful! And the world isn’t that good. I had learned that the world was horrible. The world was a place where you’re lucky if you survive a few years, and then that’s it. And this was too good to be true. So I couldn’t believe it, even though I had the dreams, I read the Bible, I read the New Testament, the rest of it. I read Paul’s letters eventually. But I couldn’t believe it because it was beautiful, and I didn’t think life and the world was beautiful yet. And it was too good to be true. And it was just remarkable. And it was hard to believe. And it implied that God is absolutely real, that Jesus Christ is his Son and the Savior of humanity. And I couldn’t get there. I tried. I really wanted to, but I couldn’t get there, and it took me a very long time to get over that last threshold, and that was not my doing. That was a direct intervention by the Holy Spirit while I was awake, and it was an experience that I will never forget. It’s, as the two dreams, that is detailed in my book, but I have rarely spoken verbally about this last experience because I find it difficult to do so. But I have done it once or twice, and if you like, I can talk about it now. I would love to hear what that profound experience was.  So I was driving alone. I lived in two places. At that time, I was teaching at University of Pittsburgh. I also had a home in New York, so I was driving back and forth fairly frequently on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and one day, I was driving, and there’s a very long stretch where there isn’t much radio, and I turned on the radio, and I heard a preacher. It was a Christian station. And I was listening to this preacher and thinking, as I had before, that many of these radio preachers have amazing abilities for oratory. They’re really able to speak well. And I didn’t really pay attention to what he was saying because I never really… at that time, I didn’t like listening to Christian radio, which I guess was hitting too close to home at that point. So I turned it off after a few minutes, but I started thinking about this idea of giving a sermon or a talk, whatever. I thought of it as a sermon. And somehow it came into my mind, “What would it be like if I gave a sermon?” which I thought was funny at first. And then I started thinking, “Well, I’d probably talk about the origin of life or something scientific.” And then it happened. I had some feeling which I can’t explain, and I pulled the car over, which was a good thing because I began seeing myself speaking to a crowd somewhere in the countryside, outside, and I was speaking a sermon. And the sermon’s words came to me without any thought. They came from outside. I’m sure of it. What I basically said was, to these people, all of whom were Christians, I said, “You people should be praised and be happy and be blessed because Jesus Christ loves you, and I know that He loves you because Jesus Christ loves even me.” And the word even was important because I knew that I was a sinner, and when I say I’m a sinner, I really mean it. I mean, I had been a terrible sinner, not only for not believing in God and rejecting Jesus, but for many other things. And I said, “He loves even me, and if He loves me, how can He not love each of you?” And I said a few more things about that, and then I stopped, and then it was over. And I was sitting in my car, and I was crying uncontrollably, and I said out loud, sitting in the car, “I believe.” And that was it. And at that moment, this huge weight just fell away, and then I understood my first dream. I had let go, and that weight was gone. And what replaced it was joy, and that has not left me one minute since then. That’s amazing. And this joy of knowing Jesus as my Savior and as One who has forgiven me, forgiven my sins, and saved me, saved my soul, saved my life. It sounds like your life has been really quite different since those days of really pushing back against God, when you were feeling that there was something missing when you had a lot of unanswered questions. I’m wondering, on the other side of that, as a believer in God, I know that there are still a lot of questions that are hard to answer, whether it’s about life in general or even things we observe in the world, but I wonder if some of those conundrums that you had from a naturalistic point of view, do you find that some of those are answerable now that you embrace a God-created worldview?  That’s an interesting question. I may have trouble answering it. I’m thinking about it. One of the big questions that many thoughtful Christians and theists in general have is the problem if evil. If God is omnipotent and all good, why is there evil. And that question doesn’t bother me as much as it does other people. What is evil depends on where you start from. What is a blessing depends on where you’re starting from. If you’re a refugee from, say, Ukraine or some war-ravaged or starving place, and you get to live peacefully for a few days with a roof over your head and have some soup to eat, that’s wonderful! Right? That’s a wonderful blessing. And if you’re used to living in a great house with lots of money and everything, you have other problems, which, you know, you might consider evil, but everybody else would say, “Wow, that’s a lucky guy.” So it depends where you start from, and where I started from was the idea that everything is bad, that there’s no good. It’s what Richard Dawkins says, pitiless indifference. That’s all there is in the universe. And that’s what I believed. So when people say is the glass half empty or half full, what I always say is, it’s a miracle that there’s any water in the glass at all. And that’s how I feel. I don’t care if it’s half empty or totally full or whatever, there’s some water there. That’s amazing. That’s a miracle. Yeah, I bet you do- In some ways, some of the questions that many people ask… I mean, I don’t think that’s the answer to the problem of evil. That’s not enough. I mean we still have these horrible things happening, these children being killed. It’s just heartrending, and I have very good friends… I’m not a young man. I have very good friends, God-fearing, wonderful Christians, who get sick, are sick, and have horrible experiences. And yeah, it’s a bad world. It is. You can’t deny that. I don’t think anyone denies that this is a bad, hard world. That’s not the point. Atheism doesn’t make it any better. Atheism doesn’t help you with that. What God has done is told us and shown us that this is not the end, that this is the vale of tears we live in, and what’s coming is what we’re hoping for. And that’s what I found too good to be true, and I couldn’t believe it until I had to believe it. Because the Holy Spirit came to me and basically dragged me across that threshold of belief, and now I know that it’s real and that it’s true. And so, in terms of science, I mean I have not given up one shred of my scientific worldview. And there’s no reason to. And that’s my main message. If you’re a person who is a Christian and has been told that science is in conflict with your faith, that’s a lie. That’s a direct lie from Satan. It’s not true. And I’m not just talking about myself. The former head of the NIH, now the President’s Science Advisor, is Francis Collins. He’s an evangelical devoted Christian. He’s one of the most brilliant scientists whose ever lived, and there are many, many, many others. I’m not going to name them all. Nobel Prize winners. Many people. So there’s no conflict between Christianity and science, and as I said, I’m still doing science. I’m still doing research. And I will probably never stop. I’m so glad you clarified that, because I think that that is, obviously, one big reason that people think that they have to reject God, because they believe in science, not in God, which they have, again, perhaps a misconception.  It’s not a choice. It’s not a dichotomy. Right! Right! Yeah. They’re very complementary. Exactly. And science started in a Christian context. I mean all the original scientists were devout Christians, and they all said that they were determining the laws that governed God’s world. They weren’t against God. Right.  If you had told even Galileo or Pasteur or Copernicus or Maxwell, or all the other scientists of the nineteenth and even early twentieth century, Lord Kelvin. If you had told them, “You choose between your science and God because they’re in conflict,” they would have looked at you with mouths open and would have said, “It’s exactly the opposite! Science is the way to understand God’s creation, and we’re doing it. Look at all we’ve done.” And that’s still true today. There’s no question about it. Right. Yeah. Your story is so full, Dr. Garte, and I can imagine that there are some skeptics who have that, just the tiniest bit of openness, that they’re willing to take a listen to your story and to your journey, and as a brilliant man, see how you’re able to bring your intellectual life, your spiritual life, your emotional life, everything in concert. It’s obviously made a tremendous change in your life. Just your perspective. I’m sure you’re an incredibly joy-filled person because you have an amazing perspective on life. Obviously, a half full kind of guy, and for good reason!  So if there’s a curious skeptic listening to you today and you could advise him towards his continued search for God, what words of wisdom could you give him?  I would say what I was told by the Holy Spirit, just let go. Because what’s stopping you from… Many people have said to me, “I would like to believe in God, but He doesn’t answer me. I don’t hear Him. I don’t see Him. I don’t detect Him.” And I say, “Yeah, I didn’t either.” And I tell a story about driving in my car and being lost in a rainstorm in the dark, and I was absolutely in a state of horror and terror and frustration and angry and everything else, and I stopped the car, again a car story, and I stopped the car, and I suddenly realized, once the car stopped, that I had the radio on, and the most beautiful music was coming out of this radio, and I had never heard it because all of this emotion, this anger, this frustration was just consuming me. Once I stopped the car and heard the music, I calmed down, and I relaxed, and I realized where I was. And a lot of people don’t realize how much they’re blocking the voice of God. The voice of God is not very powerful sometimes. It can be. But for some individuals, it can be a calm, still voice, as the Bible says. And that’s a beautiful passage because it says God is not in the thunderclap, God is not in the hurricane, He’s not in the earthquake, He’s in a small, still voice. So to hear that voice, let go. Let go of everything that is telling you, “No. It can’t be. It’s impossible.” Let that go. And then just listen and pray if you can and see what happens. That’s really good advice. And for those of us who are Christians who really want to be a light, in a sense, a way forward to help people who are looking for God, how would you advise us as Christians to best engage with those who do seem a bit resistant or maybe even those who are willing to take another look?  I would say tell your truth. And sometimes you’ll hear things that sound convincing, like, something from the Old Testament usually they’ll bring up. Just tell your truth to them, be patient, listen. You’re not going to convince somebody in a discussion to change their mind, although it has happened, and it usually happens with people sitting around a living room, and suddenly somebody says something, and the listener says, “Gee, I never thought of that,” and they feel a wave of something, and there are some amazing stories about conversions. So do the best you can, and be patient and kind. Be loving. I say that as someone who often finds that difficult, but I know that that’s really what we need to do. That’s what we’re called to do. And don’t get angry, don’t get upset. You may get attacked, but that was foreseen already. Paul has already told us about that. And you put on the armor of God and you stay steadfast, because you know what the truth is. Jesus Christ is the truth. Christianity is real. And you know that. And just don’t let that go, because there’s no reason to let that go. That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me today. Again, I am so inspired by your story, just the fullness of it, both the way that you were, again, brought up in such an antithesis of a Christian home, just the polar opposite, but yet, here you sit now, really proclaiming the truth and the reality of God, and not only proclaiming it, but I can really tell that you live it and that you’re unashamed of Who you know and Who is truth, and I hope that everyone who listens to this podcast today picks up your book, The Works of His Hands, because it will go into depth in terms of much more of the scientific questions that you wrestled with, as well as your story and the experiential aspects and spiritual aspects of all of that. It’s just such a full and gratifying read, and you can just see how God works in extraordinary ways in the lives of people who you would never think would be proclaiming his truth today, just like you.  So thank you so much for coming on and telling your story today.  I just want to mention that, if anyone wants to contact me, be on my newsletter, mailing list, or even just say anything, I always answer. My website is sygarte.com, very easy, and there’s a contact page and a sign-up page and a bunch of other pages, so that’s how you can reach me. Yeah. That’s terrific. And we will put that link in our episode notes as well. So again, thank you, Dr. Garte, for coming on today and telling your story.  It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Dr. Garte’s story. You can find out more about his book, The Works of His Hands, and how to connect with him through his website and Twitter and social media accounts in the episode notes below. For questions and feedback about this podcast episode, you can contact me through our Side B Stories website, at www.sidebstories.com. I hope you enjoyed it and that 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 an skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Psychiatrist Andrew Parker’s pursuit of the true and beautiful led him to consider the possibility of God, but his personal life hindered belief. After a long philosophical journey, he decided the cost of conversion was worth any personal sacrifice and gave him life beyond what he once imagined possible. Resources mentioned by Andrew: New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton Philosophers: Keith Ward, John Cottingham, Richard Swinburne To hear more stories about atheists 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 a skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. All of us want to make sense of reality, to understand our lives, the world around us and our place in it. We want to know who we are, why we’re here, how to live, where we’re going, and how we’re supposed to think about these bigger issues in our world. We wonder what is truth? What is beauty and goodness? Does God exist? Is there more than just the natural world? Are we really no more than merely physical beings? Is there more to us? How do we make sense of our minds and consciousness? And what of our desires? What should we be pursuing? And how can we know?  Although we all want to make sense of all of those things, some of us think more deeply about those questions than others. They’re drawn and driven by a seeking, a searching out for answers, seriously so. For they know that the answers to those questions have great implications for how they understand themselves and others, how they live life.  Today’s guest, psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Parker, is one of those few who have been contemplating those larger questions for most of his life. As a skeptic, they led him on a quest to consider the reality of God and Jesus Christ. I hope you’ll come along to hear his fascinating, inspiring, and in many ways, surprising journey. I hope you’ll stay to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching for truth, for God, as well as advice to Christians on how they can best engage with those who don’t believe.  Welcome to Side B Stories, Andrew. It’s so great to have you with me today.  Thank you, Jana. I’m really excited to be here. Thank you. Wonderful, wonderful! Before we start your story, I would love to know more about who you are now, perhaps your profession, where you live. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?  Yes. Well, I live in southeast London, England, and I’m 49 and single. Living the celibate, chaste life now, in fact, and I work as a psychiatrist in private practice in central London. General adult psychiatry with a specialty in addictions, and in fact, I got into working in addiction because of my own earlier brief addiction, but it was very serious, and I went through treatment myself at that time. And that part is also very important for my spiritual journey, which we’ll get onto a bit later. So I’m very settled in this life now and very happy in this path now as a Christian, but that wasn’t always the way. And I enjoy something of the solitary contemplative life. You have piqued my curiosity, Andrew, in terms of it sounds like you’ve got some very interesting pieces and parts of your journey. So why don’t we start in your childhood and your earliest rememberings of your family life and community life in terms of how did religion fall into your world? Were you born in the London area? Talk to me about all of that.  Yeah. Well, I was brought up in Kent, a semi-rural, really lovely village, and I feel as if I had quite an idyllic childhood. Very happy, stable, loving family. Large extended family. Lots of fun. Lots of family things together. Very simple family in many respects. Not wealthy. In fact, quite a struggle financially at times. There were four children, and my father worked. My mother was a busy mother of four and housewife, and then she trained as a primary school teacher later, so they all had a lot on their plates, but they gave us a wonderful upbringing. There was no spirituality in the home, though, at least explicitly. We were not a religious family, although we did go to the local church family service a few times for a brief period. But it just wasn’t part of our life, religion and spirituality. That’s not to say it was totally absent, however. I do remember, in fact, my father teaching me once to pray. At a very young age. And I did have enormous curiosity about the beyond, which manifested in various ways, and I did pray, in fact, at times of distress, at several key moments in my childhood and adolescence, but they were very isolated events. So really mainly it was a very secular life but a happy one. But as I grew older, I think I realized I was very drawn by the deep philosophical questions. What does lie beyond the sensory perceptual world? What is reality ultimately? What am I? What are we? Are we just material things that fizzle away to dust? Is there’s something more substantial? I got increasingly drawn by these questions in my adolescence. How did you pursue the answers to those questions? Was it just independent study? Did you start reading philosophers or spiritual material?  I did start reading philosophy later, but I was a very latecomer to reading. I was quite lazy with reading, and instead, I would think a lot. Now you could say it was just daydreaming, but I like to think there was more serious thought going on. I was becoming, I guess, something of an armchair philosopher, but around the age of 18, I discovered Plato and read Plato’s Republic and then The Symposium, and I was really blown away by this. And soon after I came across books on the mind/brain problem, the problem of consciousness. Is the mind just the brain ultimately or not? And this again caught my attention and set me on a lifelong interest in philosophy of mind. Nothing terribly spiritual at that point, no. Okay. So you were obviously a contemplative child, a contemplative adolescent. You were a deep thinker who really looked at these really large questions. As you began to think in this deep way, was it leading you away from the concept of God as the transcendent source of the answer to these questions? Or were you finding substantive answers for you that were satisfying among the philosophers, among Plato and others? And even with the problem of consciousness, it is a tremendous problem in terms of how to explain our consciousness apart from a material being. So how were you working through those issues?  Well, I need to go back a step, which I sort of hopped over, and this was something of a personal existential mini crisis. Not a really troubling crisis but just an internal, “My goodness! What do I do?” situation. Around age 15 or 16, and this was due to my increasing realization that I was of same-sex attraction. That had become apparent from early teens. I’d kept it completely private. But by 16, it was very clear indeed. And, of course, being a young person, I was craving for experience, but I saw that as being somewhat far off. I just had to be patient. But there was this other question: Is it okay? Is it okay to have same-sex sexual experience? I knew what the church said. I knew what the Bible said in very basic form. No one drummed it into me, but I had grown up with that knowledge. And I was troubled by it concerning my desires. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and on one particular occasion, I made a very extended prayer, even on my knees, which is a bit extraordinary for someone in such a secular environment at that age. I went on my knees to pray to God for an answer to this. Is it okay or is it wrong? Do gay people go to hell? It just didn’t make sense to me that they would. But it just seemed natural, as I think is the case for most people with same-sex attraction. It just seems to be who they are naturally. It doesn’t feel like you’re transgressing. Although you’re aware that it’s taboo. Now, I thought, during that prayer, “If God is real, if God answers me, how would I know that it’s really from God?” So that began a philosophical train of thought, then, about how to identify some apparent revelation as really being from God. And I realized that just a sensory vision would not be enough, and I wasn’t quite sure what would be. Nevertheless, I made the prayer, and there was no answer, it seemed. And that was that. But it, I think, ignited the question in my mind is God real? And how do we ever know, how does anyone know? How can we distinguish true revelation from false revelation? And that set of questions, which kind of roughly falls into the scoop of philosophy of religion, became an interest alongside the philosophy of mind. In fact, I saw the two as really quite tightly linked, but I decided to focus on philosophy of mind as sort of firmer, more certain ground. Less controversial, I thought. And I was very attracted to becoming a medical doctor, and I thought I could explore that through my medical studies as well. It sounds like you were moving through a lot of things. So when you were really submissive in a sense, the body posturing of prayer, you were in earnest to know more about whether or not your desires were okay. And it put you into a very deep form of thought, I guess, in terms of really looking for what is true and what is real.  Yes. Now, here’s something interesting. Because I was praying to God, but the image of God that I had was of Jesus. I was brought up in England, a vaguely Christian culture, and had learned a bit about Jesus. So I thought He is our model, our role model if you like, for how to relate to God. And so I thought, in that prayer, if I knew that Jesus and God were real, my sexuality would no longer be of any great significance, because I would want to be a disciple for Christ, and I think that was a very interesting turn around, that I began by praying around sexuality and end up by thinking I would want to be a disciple of Christ if He’s real. But knowledge of that reality only came much later. But still, to understand the seriousness of the commitment if there is a God, that to live in the way of Christ is not something that’s just superficial or flippant, that it is something that requires something of you in a substantive way. That’s amazing that you considered that, but then I guess… Did you receive any answers to your prayer?  Well, I didn’t, and I would want to emphasize that all this was over 30 or 40 minutes in my bedroom at age 16, and there was absolutely zero putting into practice at the time of anything like a Christian life. So you could say perhaps this was more fantasy thinking than a reality, but it was, in some sense, a very serious prayer, but there was a lot of, I think, idealization of what I would be if I met, encountered Christ, an heroic ideal, which of course we don’t quite live up to. So at that point, you were actually, in some ways, willing to entertain the possibility of a real God, but then you moved towards philosophy, and I wondered if God faded in the distance, particularly in the background of your same-sex attractions and the taboo, you said, associated with that and things of the church. So guide us on from there, yes.  So what Plato gave me, which has proved to be of great lasting value, is the focus on the three transcendentals of truth, beauty, goodness. Reading The Republic gave me a very profound sense that those three things are the most important values, if you like, and if you follow those three, you will reach God if He exists. And I remember a little bit whimsically saying to myself, probably around the age of 20 or so, “Well, I’ll seek truth as hard as I can through science and philosophy, and I’ll engage with beauty as much as I can through art and music and the beauty of the human form. For goodness, well, I’m not so sure about that. I’m quite attached to my pleasures, so we’ll leave goodness aside. But if I can at least do two of those three reasonably well, then by triangulation, I might get there.” Right.  And that was a sort of personal philosophy for a while. Right. And how did that work for you?  Well, that’s interesting. Because I think now that the Lord gave me a long leash to explore some of those areas. I perhaps did better on the truth side. I certainly did engage quite seriously with philosophy and also science of the mind. Beauty really went off track. I mean, I certainly developed a deep and enduring interest in classical music which got progressively more sacred, actually, and earlier and early to sort of fifteenth, sixteenth century sacred choral music. But I would rather bask in this in a sensual way, but I found it enormously, immensely beautiful. Same with art. I made a sort of progression from a very diverse taste down to more and more sacred art, Renaissance, early Renaissance paintings and sculpture. But. The big but is I was also exploring hedonistic pleasures, the beauties of the flesh, and I guess that’s the part that I refer to when I say I went off course. That got a bit excessive. So it sounds like perhaps you were torn a little bit because you’re pursuing these values of truth and beauty, which are, I guess as Lewis would say, pointers towards the transcendent.  Yes. Yes. Although I wouldn’t say I felt very conflicted at the time, actually. I’m not someone that has felt a lot of guilt. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But I think what I took from Jesus was the great importance of integrity and treating people well. I think my family also gave me that. I’m very grateful. So whoever I was with, wherever I would be, I would try to treat people well, even if I was crossing taboos, and I think the Lord is with you when you’re exploring because you don’t really know if doctrine is true or not, you don’t know if the church teaching is true. You’ve heard about it, but it doesn’t make sense to you, so you’re exploring, but you’re exploring with attention to the heart and to loving one’s neighbor, et cetera. So I’m really taken by your love for these things, love for truth, love for art, love for music, and engaging in those and appreciating those things. Did you ever look or think about the grounding for beauty or not? I wondered if, in any sense, they pointed you towards God or not.  I certainly had this sense that there was something beyond the material world and pointing towards a unity. And I very much enjoyed mathematics at school. And this was another area, actually, which I felt pointed towards the transcendent, beyond material forms. But around the same time that I was exploring those kinds of thoughts, I was also coming to think that perhaps the mind is totally explained by the brain. I was quite impressed by some of the philosophy of mind I had read, Daniel Dennett in particular. When his book came out, Consciousness Explained, I read that and a series of other books along similar lines, and I was increasingly thinking that perhaps the mind is just explained by the brain, and there isn’t anything truly transcendent. So there were these different ideas going around. I never closed the door to the transcendent completely. I never concluded that the mind is the brain. I never became atheist proper. I was always agnostic and open. And seeking, actually. But what I was seeking was something solid, some kind of solid grounding, philosophical or scientific, to answer that question. And always hovering in the background for me was the question around sexuality. If it looked more likely that God was real, I knew that, at some point, I was going to have to confront the question around sexuality again. And how did that happen?  Well, it didn’t really happen for quite a long time. What happened was that I went through medical school, did well, started work as a junior doctor, which was very hard, long hours and a huge amount of stress, and then we’re coming to my late twenties now, a time that I thought would be the best time in my life, but in fact I had a physical health scare and took a sabbatical year from work because of that, and during that year, my hedonistic streak took over, and instead of doing what I ought to have done, I went down a path of escapism and got addicted to cocaine. And that period lasted just over a year. It was extremely serious, and I was in hospital several times because of it and eventually went to rehab, and since that time, I’ve not had any problems with addiction. But I’d like to tell you about how I got into recovery, because something extraordinary happened which initiated that, or was one of the initiators of it. I had been refusing help. It had been about one year since this started, and at that point, something prompted me to pray and basically to repent, to say sorry to God for everything that had happened. Now one of the prompts for this was a picture that I had on my wall at home of St. Jerome in the Wilderness by Albrecht Dürer. It’s a very famous picture, and St. Jerome is kneeling in the wilderness, at peace, with a lion beside him, at one with nature. And he’s gently beating his breast in repentance for the wrongs in his life. And his countenance is really sublimely peaceful, not one of despair, and his eyes are looking towards a tiny, makeshift cross that he had made. And this image really struck me. I thought, “There’s nothing to fear about repentance, about saying sorry to God for wrongs. In fact, it appears to bring peace.” And I felt this picture was saying something important to me at this time, so what I embarked upon in the midst of my addiction was, over a period of many days, possibly weeks, to go through my whole life like a piece of string chronologically, and each time I came across, in my mind, a knot, that knot would represent a time when I hadn’t been the best version of myself. What I was seeking was not just the immediate reasons for the addiction but actually all of the much earlier precursors, all the earlier faults in my character that built up and built up, that made me go my own way so foolishly, that made me so stubborn against advice, that made me so hedonistic, seeking selfish pleasures and so forth. So I was seeking the roots, and so I did actually imagine my life as a thread and these knots along the way, and I would pause in these knots and imaginatively go into that scene using memory and immerse myself in that and look at it from different perspectives and say sorry. And try to feel genuine remorse, even for what might seem quite trivial things, like telling a fib as a child or evading responsibility for something. I saw these as the precursors to what came later with the addiction, so I felt I had to get to the root of it all. So I did this over a series of weeks, inspired, as I said, by St. Jerome, and at some point, having completed that, I decided to make my own makeshift cross out of a couple of pieces of cardboard, and I fixed that to the wall, and a day or two later, I looked at this cross, and I just felt overwhelmed and dropped to my knees. It was automatic. I dropped to my knees, and tears were streaming down my face, and I was full of joy. Now, this sounds very extraordinary, but there was something like a beam of light coming down on me, and I was in tears of joy, and I remember thinking, “I need to stay here and just let this light come in, because it’s purifying my heart,” and I felt forgiven, and I felt accepted, and I wanted to stay there for as long as possible to make sure that every last corner had been cleansed. And I just felt in the presence of God at that point. I had a vision of Jesus standing there whilst all this was happening. It was quite faint, but it was definitely Jesus. And, after some time, I got up, and I still had a sense of this light. It said to me God loves me, God accepts me, God is forgiving me and letting me know that if I take the right path now, He will be with me all the way. And that was of massive benefit, because I had lost all hope of getting into recovery at that point. I thought I had wrecked my career completely. So many people who knew about the addiction and its effects, senior colleagues at work. So I thought there was no way I could get back to working as a doctor, but after this encounter, I knew that I had to get well, I had to take the right path, and that God would be with me. That sounds like a very, very powerful, palpable encounter, obviously life changing for you. It came on the heels of your repentance, almost a protracted, very honest, transparent repentance over a period of weeks. That’s really quite amazing, Andrew, and obviously, you were able to turn the corner. You found hope and somehow through, as you say, you felt the presence of God with you, so that you were able to let go of your addiction, I presume, you said after a period of time?  So things came together, interestingly, all at one, by my sister… One of my sisters found an excellent rehab center in South Africa for me. Around the same time, I got to see, for the first time, an addictions consultant, who was excellent and took a thorough history and gave me good advice. So I had the courage, then, to enter treatment, which I did thoroughly and properly, and then through NA, the 12 steps, and so forth. I don’t know that I would ever have done that without that encounter with God. But even after that encounter, I did not join the church. I do remember thinking whether I should. And that thought was very, very brief. And the reason I didn’t is, again, because of my sexual orientation. I thought joining the church would bring too much conflict, and also I felt I had encountered God outside the church, so why was church necessary? I already had a community of friends, so I thought, “Well, maybe I need to improve my community a bit. Community, I think, would be very advantageous for my recovery.” So I had a think about what kind of new community I could find. So instead of joining a church, I joined a rugby club. In fact, the world’s first gay-inclusive rugby club, in London, called the Kings Cross Steelers. And that was a wonderful community to be part of for something like nine years following my addiction treatment. So you were… Just to clarify again, you were convinced, at this point in your life, you were perhaps more of a theist? Or would you consider yourself someone who believed in the transcendent reality of God? In the Person of Christ but- I think my mind was rather split, actually. With the different parts not talking to each other too much. There was a part of me that was still pursuing this, that the mind is just the brain, scientific material will show that God is just a figment of the imagination of some kind. There was another part that was very open to something more, but after that encounter, I did think God was real, but I was also open to nonreligious concepts of spirituality, as a vague spiritual ether, and Jesus is some kind of archetypal figure. And because I was English, a Christian country, it was Jesus I saw. If I had been brought up in a different culture, it might have been some other religious figure. But I didn’t think about those kinds of questions too much for a long time. I just got on with my work, playing rugby, having a fun social life, still with a hedonistic streak, but without cocaine addiction. But I knew at some point I was going to have to address these questions more thoroughly. And a few years after being in recovery—in fact reading Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion was one of the prompts in fact. I enjoyed that book, and it made me laugh, but he’s not very theologically or philosophically minded. And I slammed the book shut and thought, “No, he’s wrong. He’s ridiculing God. He doesn’t understand.” And I thought, “I need to go back and examine my experience and see what do I really believe?” I wanted to write a book to help others of my journey, but I thought, “How can I talk about that experience to others if I’m not certain what it was?” And, “How would they be convinced given it all happened in the midst of an addiction?” Quite rightly, they would be highly skeptical. So I decided that I had to be clear from a rational point of view what the evidence says, scientific and philosophical, concerning theism versus atheism, and in particular, the soundness of the worldview of scientific materialism, which says everything basically is physical material, including the mind, which means that all apparent mystical experience would be ultimately explained by brain states and would not mean anything, any ontological realm transcendent to the material. So slowly, over something like seven, eight years, I read many more books, and gradually this came together, and I realized that there were far more pointers towards theism than atheism. And not only that, these scientific and philosophical pointers tended to work in synergy with each other, so they related to each other and supported each other. I also saw very pervasive bias in a lot of the literature that many inquirers just couldn’t take seriously the possibility that God is real, and so every bit of evidence pointing that direction has to be taken apart. Rather than following the pointers to where it may lead and thinking carefully about that possibility on its own terms, I saw that many popular writers were dismantling every bit of evidence and never stepping into the realm to consider, “Actually, this could be truth, and what implications might that have for oneself and the differences of opinion.” So this was gradual work over several years, and it was leading me to make a decision. “Am I going to take God more seriously, religion more seriously, Jesus more seriously, the church more seriously?” And yet, because of my sexual orientation, this was such a massive thing, because I knew I would have to confront that question. As you may have gathered, I’m not someone that does things by halves if I’m interested in them. Right.  I don’t like to compromise. And I knew what the orthodox teaching was on sexual orientation. I didn’t know if it was true, but I knew I would have to confront it. And that delayed me. But my hedonistic streak was also delaying me. I was still having fun, playing rugby, socializing, and I was in my late thirties, but I was increasingly coming to realize that after the encounter that I had had at age thirty, I wasn’t perhaps living with complete integrity, given I had gratitude for this encounter, but I was doing very little else about it. And I was increasingly wanting to serve in some way, to bring to others what I had been given, to mature as well, to develop spiritually. But I had to be sure. I had to be more sure about what I really believed and why. So this intellectual search was just really about finding a foundation or testing a foundation for the earlier encounter. Eventually, I decided that the evidence for theism is far greater than that of atheism, and I would therefore be a fool not to take that earlier encounter very seriously. So I decided that I would be joining a Christian church, and I didn’t know which denomination. I had no idea. But I was reaching that decision around the summer of 2012. I was also retiring from rugby that season. So I anticipated some change of life, that I would enter a Christian community, learn through this more virtuous group. I would face struggles around sexuality. I didn’t know which way that would go. And I certainly didn’t expect anything extraordinary to happen. I just thought I would be learning through a community gradually. But this is what in fact did happen: After a holiday in Italy, looking at sacred art, I returned to London, and there had been for some time these sublime intrusions in my awareness occurring, often during my periods of reading and contemplation, and they would stop me in my tracks. They were so deeply peaceful. And I felt the presence, I felt a communal presence, but it was very mysterious, and I didn’t really know what it was, but I came to identify these as encouragements, and they speeded up my decision making. And around the same time as these were increasing, I had a very profound dream, so vivid that I wrote it down, which I’d never done before. The whole theme of the dream was purity, and also in the dream was a figure of Mary, with Jesus, having come down from the cross, in her arms. And this was extraordinary because, although I’d looked at a lot of sacred art, the Blessed Virgin Mary had not played any significance for me in my imagination, and yet, in this dream, I kneeled in front of her in adoration. And then another figure appeared, and that was St. Paul. And St. Paul and I, in the dream, clasped each others’ arms. Now, Paul was significant for me because it is his words in the New Testament that the teaching against same-sex sexuality is often drawn from. And so there was a bit of hostility in my mind with St. Paul, but in this dream, we are reconciled in a very warm way. And I took that as meaning, the whole dream together, as being a call to purity, but an acknowledgment that maybe the church has not dealt with these matters in a very sensitive way sometimes. So that was just a dream. And I didn’t want to make too much of it. It was just a dream. But two weeks later, I decided to go to a homeless shelter to volunteer my services near Victoria Station, but on the way, I got a bit lost and found myself in front of the Roman Catholic cathedral, Westminster Cathedral, and I stood in the square in front of the doors, and I felt very, very drawn to go in, so I went in, and just after I arrived, a bell went, and a priest arrived, and Mass was beginning, and I thought, “Well, I decided to try the different denominations. Here I am now in a Catholic church, so let me try this.” And I stood up and sat down dutifully like everybody else and followed the Mass as closely as I could, but in the middle of the Gospel reading, something miraculous happened. First, I saw a set of lights high above, and one of these lights shot down to me and seemed to enter me, and from that point, I felt all my sins fall away. I felt completely released from chains and completely forgiven. And I was full of joy. It was a bit like the earlier encounter, but this time with greater fullness. It felt more profound. The word salvation was in my mind. And all around seemed to be a holy presence. And I remember thinking, “That holiness is not me. It’s the presence of God.” I was completely full of joy, and I felt released and that I had become better in my nature. I felt more able to be good, and it was all instant. And I came out of the cathedral that day and looked up to the skies and thanked God and felt that I was completely in the palm of His hand. I had no doubt at all about the reality of God at that point, and I knew at that point that I was changed very profoundly that that would be permanent, that this wasn’t just a transitory thing, and that I was on a new path. And that has been borne out. That’s extraordinary. Yes. As I’m listening to you, I’m just picturing it in my own mind and wondering… Obviously, that was an encountering, as you say, a profound encountering with the Person of God that was, again, another life-changing experience in which you felt, not only known and seen but called to a certain way of living, I’m also struck, too, because, at the end of this, you were convinced, but it had come on the heels of, you say, seven to eight years of reading books, intellectually contemplating the reality of God, looking at the theistic worldview and how the components are synergistic in terms of they work together. They explain reality in a much better way than the naturalistic, materialistic worldview. I imagine, too, you, as a psychiatrist, just reaching back to childhood, when you were asking the big questions of life. Who am I? Why am I here? Where did I come from? Those very deeply existential questions for us all have to be explained within a certain worldview or a view of reality, and I wonder, in that time of exploration intellectually, existentially, what you were finding that was so convincing and compelling that almost enabled you to experience this final encounter in a much more profound and almost convincing way. Because it’s like the pieces of you had come together in a way.  Yeah. That your intellectual self… You had spoken of them being separate, that you had a sense of God, but you were living your own life, but you were exploring things intellectually, but somehow, after all this time, God pulls the pieces together in this one grand encountering with Him at a point at which then everything came together for you.  That’s right. I think that’s a very good image. Because at that point, feeling released from sin, released from chains which had held me down, and this sense of salvation and complete forgiveness, I also realized I had a soul. That the soul is not just a metaphor for some part of the mind but is very deep, perhaps reaching infinitely to God, but something opened. I just became aware of the depths of my being. But yes. This second encounter was a far fuller conversion. I talk about my conversion as if it was in two parts, but the first part kind of set me on the road for recovery from addiction. It did not pull me into the church. God allowed me to continue my own way and I think encouraged me to make that intellectual search, but when I was satisfied intellectually, I then commit myself to serving Christ out of gratitude for that earlier event. And by that point, I was ready to surrender to Christ and offer myself in service. It was, again, repentance, actually, immediately before this second conversion event. Around sexuality. It was not that I… I never felt the need to repent for having same-sex attraction, but the way I’d lived that out, with some excess, I certainly did repent for. But I was very concerned that I wouldn’t be able to remain celibate and chaste. I was not achieving it for more than a few days at a time. But from the point of that conversion, I became celibate and chaste, and it has been rather permanent. There’s been a few brief periods in my life since then, over nine, ten years, where I deliberately broke that to test things during periods of difficulty, but 99% of the time, I’ve been on the celibate path. And the immediate sense was joy about it. I had just so much love for the Lord at this point. Love had been poured in. I felt I didn’t need any more. And the Holy Spirit gives you the ability. He gives you an extra strength. It opens up ways of being which you didn’t know before. That’s not to say there won’t be significant struggles at some point. Certainly, I have had those. But there was a sense of a gift being given on that day in Westminster Cathedral. That’s amazing! It’s a really amazing story. It sounds as if your life has been completely transformed. It sounds deepened, expanded, in just amazing ways from a secular life, really pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty. But that you have found new realms, deeper realms. Like you say, you discovered your soul. And it sounds like you have found the source, the transcendent source of truth, goodness, and beauty this time, that you were exploring and appreciating all of those things and looking at them through the eyes, through the lens, of a theistic worldview, of a God who’s not only grand and transcendent but also it sounds like intimately personal to you and in your life. There’s no part of reality, it seems, that is untouched.  That’s right. It’s all encompassing. And what I’ve told you so far is simply what happened on that day of conversion in 2012. A lot more happened after that, in the following year. Specific occasions, specific events, and those further things drew me more towards the contemplative spiritual life, and in fact, I spent some time discerning possible vocation as a monk and did three months of postulancy in an enclosed, contemplative monastery in 2016 to test that out in a more serious way. Eventually, I decided not to stay. I found that age, in my early forties by that time, it’s quite difficult to adapt to that austere life. And in fact I was craving to be back in the world to proclaim the word of God in some form. So I’m back, but I engage in my work, and I’m trying to develop some kind of a ministry, but I also try to protect my solitary time. I can imagine that even your practice as a psychiatrist, your perspectives, have changed in the way that you’re helping others through those large existential and experiential questions of life. As we are turning the corner here, Andrew, I can imagine that there are many out there who are searching and seeking and questioning whether or not God is real. You went through quite a journey intellectually. You did due diligence- Yes, I did. … not only to your mind, but also you were willing to look into your heart, which many of us would dare to go. It’s a very brave endeavor, even thinking back to your experience in cocaine addiction, your willingness to look at yourself. I wonder, for those who might be listening, how would you counsel someone to journey towards pursuing the reality of God, whether it’s intellectually or in their own life personally. How would you advise them So now the spiritual dimension of mental health care is extremely important and often under emphasized, undervalued, and it is a big interest of mine, how to do that well. So people need to go on their own interior journeys, and you can’t come to faith by just reading a book. Books can help. You’ve got to have your interior journey of deeper integrity, honesty with self, and some prayer. Talk to God. No one else is listening, if you’re in private. So have courage and trust. If there is someone who says, “Yes, but I need to understand rationally, intellectually,” you obviously read, like you said, several books over a seven- to eight-year period. Is there any particular direction you might direct someone to find that synergy, the groundedness of theism or the Christian worldview? What helped you the most?  Well, there were different kinds of books that helped me a lot. Some of the authors I found most helpful on the philosophical side were Keith Ward, John Cottingham, Haldane, Swinburne, but when I got into matters of the heart, it was a different set of writers, people like Thomas Merton. I was very touched by his book The New Seeds of Contemplation. Very good. Now, as someone who was a former skeptic, agnostic, and someone who really understands both sides, how would you encourage or advise Christians to best engage with those who, unlike your former self, was resistant to the Person of God for a while?  I think you have to love people where they’re at, even if you think they’re living in sin, that you should try to reach out to engage with them and make them part of your life. Of course, there may come a point where they’re just not interested and they’re maybe even combative, and you have to let things go, but you can always return. But it’s very important not to be judgmental because I don’t think sexual sins are the worst sins. I don’t think substance addictions are the worst sins. I know that many of the people I work with in addiction have been through great traumas, and they are very good people with beautiful hearts. They’re just troubled and wounded hearts that have got into trouble with one thing or another. And, as humans, we can’t see the person’s heart fully. We just get glimpses of it. God sees that person’s heart fully. So we must not be judgmental about ways of life that are contrary to Orthodox Christian teaching. Through loving and just giving time and trying to impart something of the Gospel, not necessarily through words, I think is the most powerful thing. And of course also prayer. You can pray for everyone you meet, friends, family, and strangers, and that is very powerful. I really believe in that. Because I’ve noticed many times that the people I pray for who seem to be in desperate situations that I can’t help too much, suddenly they have turn-arounds. Everything comes together. And they come back and say thank you to me, but I’ve done very little, and I think, “Actually, it wasn’t me, but I did pray,” and so I do really believe in the power of prayer. It’s worked for me, and I think it works for others. That’s a wonderful way to wrap this up. At the end of the day, it really is all about God reaching down and touching hearts and bringing all of us, as wounded, troubled people, to Himself and transforming us. And when I think about your story and I hear words like that you had tears of joy and that you were filled with the fullness, really, of what God has for you, I think that that is something that we all really seek for. You obviously have a very deep and intimate contemplative life with the Lord, obviously informed every part of you, and even the tone of your voice and the way that you speak, there is that peace that seems to reside in you, that I think is a beautiful living testimony of all of that that is possible with and through a surrendered life to God.  I am so privileged to have you on our podcast today, Andrew.  I feel so lucky to have been invited, Jana. Thank you so much. Yes. It’s been wonderful. So thank you so much for your time.  Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Andrew Parker’s story. You can find out more about his recommendations for pursuing the truth and reality of God in the episode notes accompanied with this podcast. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our Side B Stories website at 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.

Professor Craig Keener became a convinced atheist at an early age. When philosophy left him without solid answers, his intellectual curiosity led him to consider the possibility of God. Resources by Craig: https://craigkeener.com Resources mentioned by Craig: Stephen Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable? 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 but who became a Christian against all odds. We all believe what we believe because we believe it to be true. We believe that our beliefs are true because they match up with reality, the way things really are in the world, and we are usually pretty convinced that we’re right, or else we wouldn’t believe it, right?  Sometimes we run into people who seem to have exceptionally strong, unwavering confidence for their beliefs. In fact, they have given their lives towards deep understanding, living out and sharing their beliefs with others, but what seems even more extraordinary is that they completely shifted their way of seeing the world and perceiving reality to a nearly polar opposite view from where they once were. There was something that was profoundly convincing enough for them to change. This begs the question: What was the information, events, reflections, or experiences that opened the door for them to another whole different set of beliefs? How do we change the basic way we think about the world around us, the way we think about ourselves? Those are huge questions.  Usually, there has to be something we come to learn or experience that seems to conflict with what we know, that challenges our beliefs. We begin to question ourselves and our knowledge and perhaps come open to another possibility of what is true and real, but that also takes a bit of humility, of admitting that we might be wrong, and more often than not, that’s not an easy thing to do. There are those thinkers who are seriously curious seekers who want to find answers, even if they don’t seem to line up with their own beliefs at the time. They want to find the truth no matter where it is to be found and what it is, as long as it is true.  Former atheist Dr. Craig Keener is one of those with a brilliant mind who desired to discover what was true about reality. Although he once held a belief in strict naturalism that only the natural world exists, he came to believe that reality consists of so much more, and he’s now a professor, prolific writer, and scholar in biblical studies. How did that shift happen? I hope you’ll come to listen to his story today. You might also want to stay to the end to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching for God and truth, as well as advice to Christians on how best to engage with those who don’t believe.  Welcome to Side B Stories, Craig. It’s so great to have you!  It’s a privilege to be with you, Jana. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, can you tell the listeners a little bit about who you are?  I’m a professor of biblical studies. I did my PhD in New Testament and Christian Origins at Duke University. I’ve authored somewhere over 30 books now. One of them is 4,500 pages. It cites over 45,000 references from ancient sources outside the Bible. So that’s my main focus of research, putting the Bible in its historical context in antiquity. My wife is Dr. Médine Moussounga Keener. She is from Congo in central Africa, and she did her PhD in France. let’s go back to the very beginning, and why don’t you tell me a little bit about your upbringing. Tell me, Craig, about your home. Was there any religious belief in your home? Where did you grow up? Did you grow up in the United States or what area of the country? Did the culture affect any of your beliefs. Talk with me about your early childhood.  Sure. I grew up in suburban northern Ohio, and my parents were very respectable socially and morally and so on, but there was no religious belief talked about in our home. We didn’t attend church or any other religious institution. So when I would study religion, I was studying it from the encyclopedia or things like that, studying religions, studying philosophies, and so on. Just as a matter of interest. Especially, I liked ancient Greek philosophy and so forth. But I think at least by the age of nine… I didn’t believe in life after death, because I remember having a conversation with a family member, and they said, “No, we don’t believe in that, either.” And I’m pretty sure I was an atheist by then. I was purely naturalistic, materialistic, empirically oriented, and I think by the time of age eleven or twelve, I remember having a conversation with my grandmother, who was a Christian, Catholic, and I was telling her I didn’t believe in God, and she said, “Well, what about a first cause?” And I said, “No.” I just went on and postulated infinite regression and said, “It could go way, way back, just infinitely in time.” I didn’t know yet that that doesn’t work in terms of the laws of physics and relativity and so on, but I was eleven.  So, as time went on, though, I began to question some of my certainties. First of all, I want to say I’m incredibly impressed, at the age of nine and eleven, that you were thinking in philosophical terms, that you must’ve been a very erudite child, an avid reader, a thinker. I presume, from the very beginning, you told us that you have a prolific library of books that you’ve authored. You’re an extensive researcher. So I imagine your curiosity about life and reality started when you were very young. I presume that you were fostered in that way.  Yeah. So, when you were reading, you said you were reading philosophy and about religions. Was this some kind of investigation, even as a child, that you were pursuing on your own? Or was it at the impetus of any of your teachers or your parents? What were you looking for as you were searching, even at such an early age, through the religions?  My mother encouraged whatever kind of intellectual pursuits I would have, so it was just kind of what I was interested in. And I was certainly interested in everything Greek, pretty much Roman, most things from ancient Mediterranean or Near Eastern antiquity, apart from the Bible. But Plato was really kind of a turning point for me. When I got to be about age thirteen, and reading Plato’s discussions of the immortality of the soul, I began to wonder. I didn’t think his arguments for the immortality of the soul were convincing, but his questions about it really got me thinking. I was also reading a book about that time, a mathematical discussion of infinity, and thinking about, “You know, forever is a long time.” And also I used to visit a medical lab where somebody had come and spoken at our high school, and so I would tag along with him sometimes and go visit the medical lab, and one day, they wheeled a corpse by, and I was like, “What’s that?” “It’s a dead body.” And it was something I couldn’t get away from, the reality of the questions. So when you say the reality of the questions, now, again, just to reiterate, at this point, you had declared yourself an atheist, and you said you believed in naturalism. If you could… I know that there’s a lot of definitions of atheism floating around. At that time, how would you have described what you believed atheism to be and what naturalism to be?  Yeah. My naturalism, by the time I was thirteen, was getting mixed up with platonic idealism, which isn’t exactly naturalism, so I’m holding these different epistemologies, pure empiricism on the one hand, which can’t be proven empirically, and platonic idealism on the other, which definitely can’t be proved empirically, so I was inconsistent, admittedly. You were reading about all of these Greek mythologies, but you didn’t believe that any god existed, any being outside of the natural world existed. I presume that you believed that all of those things, all of those gods, or the one God, were all mythological.  I didn’t rule out the possibility of spirits, of spirit beings. I just didn’t believe in a Creator God. I thought I could explain everything without recourse to that hypothesis. Now, given what I know now and actually given what we know a lot more from physics now than was even known back then, my views were not really very well founded, but it’s where I was. And philosophically speaking, you were convinced, then, I guess, in platonic idealism or the forms? Or some form of reality without a personal being outside of the universe?  I wouldn’t say I was completely convinced by Plato. It just seemed like the best logic I knew of at that point. And I was still looking for something more. But as far as God, my thinking was, “Look, most people are stupid.” Talk about intellectual snob. Whether I was intellectual or not might be debated, but I certainly was a snob. “Most people are stupid. 80%,” and back then, I think it was about 80%, of the people in this country claim to be Christian, and they don’t even live like they believe it. Because if I really believed that I owed my existence to a God, I would give everything to that God. But they don’t live like they believe it, so why would I take it seriously when even the people who claim to be Christians don’t?” And I wasn’t distinguishing between the really serious ones and the pseudo ones, or today we might say the really nasty ones and the nice ones or whatever. I just threw everybody in the same boat. Obviously, you didn’t have a high view of Christians or perhaps Christianity, but what did you think religion was? As an atheist, what did you consider religion to be?  I don’t know that I would’ve used the language of an opiate for the masses, but that’s probably pretty much what I thought of it, just people are scared to die, and they’re scared to be off on their own in an empty universe, and they just comfort themselves with a fantasy is how I would have viewed it at that point. So it was wishful thinking for, as you say, the ignorant I suppose and perhaps the weak. Again, you were reading Plato. You were finding some answers not satisfying. What were the questions that you were asking that you found that were leaving you still wanting more?  What I couldn’t explain just based on my pure naturalism was my own consciousness, my own… I’m inside me. How did I get to be? And it can’t be from me, myself, because I, in contrast to what Plato said about the preexistence of a soul… That’s one thing I wasn’t persuaded on, and so if a soul wasn’t preexistent… I had a beginning, and if I had a beginning, then I was certainly going to have an ending. And it didn’t make sense to me. Why am I perceiving the universe from this standpoint as a self? As a personal being? And I’m perceiving other people as personal beings, but they’re outside of me. I didn’t cause them. Maybe I’m hallucinating them. I did consider that, based on Plato’s idea, don’t trust the world of senses, but then I was in a quandary because I also realized, “Okay, the book that I read. When I’m reading Plato, I’m reading it through my sense knowledge.” I really went to town with this stuff. But I began to realize, if there is a source of my consciousness, my existence, and it’s not me, and there’s just an infinitesimal chance of my own personal existence, with the genetics and the environment and everything coming together, all the marriages and unions all the way back for me to exist as me, I was like, “I don’t know how that works unless maybe I’m just hallucinating my finite existence.” Or… The one hope I had was, “If there’s something infinite, if I could tap into that, but how would I get to something infinite when I’m finite? And if there is a God,” so I suppose by this point I was starting to drift towards agnosticism, but as far as everybody knew, I was an atheist. I just made fun of Christians. Well, there were a few Christians I didn’t make fun because I could tell they were really serious. I respected even. A few that I thought were really, really serious, even though I didn’t agree with them. I just kind of avoided talking about religion with them. But I started thinking, “Okay, if there’s an infinite being, that would be great, because the infinite being could obviously confer immortality through union with itself somehow, but why would the infinite being care about me?” I was not only finite, but if the infinite being cared about me, it would have to be because the infinite being was also loving, and why would an infinite loving being care about me, because I clearly wasn’t loving. I just didn’t want to die and stop existing. I didn’t care about this being. I didn’t care about anybody else’s immortality at that point. Well, not very much. So my big thing was, “How can I have it?” And that’s where I was left. I didn’t have a solution to it, and it seemed to me like the possibility of a loving, infinite being would be the best of all possible scenarios, and yet I had no reason to believe it. It would just be maybe wishful thinking. So then you would be back in that place, in a sense, that you had accused the Christians of, of somewhat inventing a god that they wanted to be true. So in some ways your grandmother’s question of first cause came back, but kind of in a different way, in a more philosophical, existential way, rather than first cause of the universe, per se. But in terms of transcendence, though, it had to be a personal agency, right? A personal agent. And had to be infinite. I mean, the concepts that you’re speaking of, again, are pretty deep, especially for, it sounds like, a teenager at this time. You’re really considering your own mortality. You’re considering your lack of immortality, as it were. Your sense of personhood and how that could continue or not in time, based upon whether you’re physical only or if there’s something more to you. Those are really big questions. And of course, like you say, who would create a being like you or me? Unless it was out of love.  And those are, again, very deep and contemplative things, and so those deep questions and being honest with yourself, I guess, about them, those were the catalysts for you to continue forward, I suppose, in trying to resolve what seems to be a real existential point of tension. And intellectual point of tension. There’s a dissonance, whether it’s cognitive or emotional or existential, there are some issues that you needed to be resolved. And I’m sitting here wondering how is it that a thirteen year old could solve those kinds of issues, wanting there to be a god but, in a way, not being able to solve those grand issues in any kind of a direct way. So I’m curious, Craig. Walk us forward. Because I want to know how you found some answers.  Yeah. I thought I could explain the universe purely naturalistically. Now I know I was wrong, but that’s what I thought. And I thought may be platonic idealism might explain my own existence as a sentient being, but platonic idealism couldn’t explain the material universe, and I couldn’t explain from pure naturalism my own existence as a sentient being or the meaning of it, at least. And so that’s where I kind of left it. I was really getting a commitment to platonic idealism, but as I would walk to school, I would still look both ways for cars when I crossed the street and still, even if, okay, the sense world is purely my hallucination, just in case, I’d better play by the rules. Just in case. But I didn’t really have a solution. That’s kind of where I left it. Except I started saying, “If there’s a god or a goddess, a he or a she or an it or whatever, if there’s something out there, and you do happen to love and care about people, please show me.” So it was a humble prayer. It was like, “I don’t know how to solve this,” so you just prayed to whoever? Yeah. Yeah. Just desperately. And every once in a while, I’d repeat that, just that cry to whoever, if anybody was listening, meanwhile putting up the front like I’m convinced of atheism, but by this point, just in case… I gave Christianity only about a 2% chance, so I guess I wasn’t 100% atheist, but Christianity seemed to me to be the least plausible of all things, but I didn’t want to stake eternity on even a 2% chance, and eternity is a long time. I didn’t know about Pascal’s wager, but if I had, I would have said, “Yeah, that’s probably right.” Pascal was a brilliant mathematician, and one of his contemplations, his pensées, was if there is a God and you live like there isn’t one, you’ll be really sorry. But if there isn’t a god, and you live like there’s one, well, really not too much harm done. You don’t stake all of eternity on your mistake if you make the mistake the wrong way there. But what eventually happened was not the kind of evidence that I was wanting. I wanted empirical evidence, or archaeological evidence. There actually is some of that, but I didn’t know. I wanted somebody to show me in a way that satisfied my intellect, which is a good thing for that to be done, and I want to provide evidence for people in that way today. But that’s not what happened in my case. Because God was going to welcome me, but He wouldn’t welcome me with my idols, and I idolized my intellect, and God has given us so much evidence, but God is not obligated to jump through our hoops. We don’t get to decide what kind of evidence He’s going to give us. We have to look where He’s offered the evidence, and He’s offered plenty of it, but we say, “Well, God you have to do it this way or I’m not going to believe you.” Well, it’s our tough luck. So I was walking home from school one day, and it was after Latin class, and a couple of very conservative Christians dressed in black suits with ties, and they could’ve been anything, but anyway, they stopped me on the street with one of my friends, and they said, “Do you know where you’re going to go when you die?” And I figured, “Okay, these are probably religious people. I’m just going to humor them.” I said, “Probably either heaven or hell,” and I laughed, but they didn’t laugh. They were very serious. So they started in explaining how I could be sure I could go to heaven when I died because Jesus died for me and Jesus rose again. Well, when I saw they were serious, actually this was a concern of mine, but they were just talking to me from the Bible. And I said, “Look, you guys, I don’t believe in the Bible. I’m an atheist. Do you have any other evidence?” And they looked at each other like, “Uh oh,” and I realized they don’t have anything else to give me. So I said, “Look, if there’s a God, where did the dinosaur bones come from?” You know, if you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer. They weren’t trained in paleontology. They weren’t trained in apologetics either. They just… All they knew was… They just knew Jesus died and rose again and that’s how you could be saved. So I argued with them for, like, 45 minutes, but when it got to that point, they said that the devil put them there to deceive us. I said, “Okay, guys. I’m going to see you later,” and I started walking off. So, okay, they didn’t know paleontology, they didn’t know apologetics, but they did know the heart of what makes us right with God, what Jesus did for us. We couldn’t bring ourselves to God. That was something I already figured out philosophically. Well, God was now reaching out to me through this message, and I walked off from them, but there was a Presence there that was so strong that hadn’t been there when I made fun of Christians or when I read about different religions or read about different philosophies. There was a presence that wouldn’t let me alone. And I walked home trembling, not because of these guys but because of what was still with me. And it was maybe an hour after we talked, I don’t know the exact amount of time, but I was just overwhelmed with the presence of God. It was in the room with me when I got home, and it was so strong, it’s like, “Okay, I have wanted this chance, if there was a God, that God would show me. This isn’t the way I had expected it, but you know, I would be an idiot, if God is here in the room with me, to blow my chance,” and I’m like, “Okay, God. I don’t understand how Jesus died for me and rose from the dead, how that makes me right with you, but if that’s what you’re saying, I’ll believe it. But God, I don’t know how to be made right with You, so if You want to make me right with You, You need to do it Yourself.” And what I’m about to describe, I know this is not typical. Most people I know don’t have this happen. But God was very gracious to me, considering where I was coming from. All of a sudden, I felt something rushing through my body, like I’d never felt before. I jumped up scared out of my mind, like, what in the world was this? But I said, “Okay, God. I always said if I ever believed there was a God, I would give God everything, so that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t know how to do it right, but I’m going to do my best.” So I found a Bible. Now, once I had secretly started reading a Bible, and I started in Genesis 1, and that didn’t go very well for me. What I thought it meant. I didn’t understand about ancient or Eastern creation narratives and different literary genres. I wasn’t sophisticated at all in literary terms like that. But I started reading the New Testament, and there was a church where a pastor had seen me running to school in the rain sometimes when he was taking his daughter to school. He stopped and gave me a ride. So he was one of the people I didn’t make fun of. I’d always thought, “Okay. He’s sincere, and he’s nice. So I’m not going to be mean to him.” But I said, “Okay, I’m going to check out his church.” And so I got there, I think, at 7:30 in the morning, as if it were school, and there was nobody there! And I thought, “Well, I’m not sure when I’m supposed to come.” But I stopped back a little bit later. This was two days after my conversion experience. And when I stopped back later, Sunday school was in progress, and they took me to the teenager’s class, and I found out later the teenagers thought I was a little bit strange. My shoes didn’t match. My face was half shaven. As you can tell, I still don’t like to shave too much, but anyway that was the beginning of my Christian life. Wow! That’s pretty extraordinary. I find it really interesting that God didn’t, as you say, meet you in a way that you expected. And speaking of Blaise Pascal, it kind of reminds me of his night of fire. This brilliant mathematician, the polymath, Blaise Pascal, incredibly intellectual, just became overwhelmed with the presence of God. He experienced God, and his life was forever changed in a passionate way. And it sounds like that’s what happened with you. It’s like, when you actually experienced the presence of God, everything changes! And it didn’t sounds like you had this experience and then you still had… I’m sure you had some intellectual questions and having to tease all of this out, but it sounds to me that there was no doubt in your mind and in your heart and soul that God was real and that God existed and that God had somehow touched down in your life and made Himself known, based upon that prayer that you had offered, that 2% chance prayer, and He took that 2% and then made it 100%. To where you were completely convinced, and then you started on this journey of really learning, I suppose. Like you say, what scripture is, what church is, and obviously became a very learned scholar on all of those things. But I also love the way that you presented the gospel there. That really it is God reaching down and bringing us to Himself through the person of Christ and what He’s done.  So all of your doubts were erased, but you still had a lot of learning to do, and you started reading the scripture. A lot of it didn’t make sense. Why don’t you walk us on from there?  Sure. Yeah. I mean there’s this one level, I know that I know, and I had to eat humble pie, because I had to go back and apologize to a bunch of Christians that I’d made fun of. And they were like, “Wow!” And I had some relatives who were very pious, and they were among the few people I didn’t make fun of because I knew they were very serious with it, and I respected their seriousness. And when I told them, they were like, “We’ve been praying for you for years,” so I realized, “Okay, well I wasn’t completely on my own here.” It was good to find out that. But intellectually, I still had a lot of questions. When you look at sociological studies of conversion, my understanding is that often people are socialized into it gradually. That wasn’t the way it was for me, and so I wasn’t getting questions answered along the way. So had plenty of questions, and people in the church, friends, and the pastor, for sure, were able to address some of the questions, but they weren’t able to address all of them. And that started me on a long road of having to get the answers and to nuance the things that I was initially taught as a Christian, once I was converted, and just keep seeking for truth. Which is a good thing, because God is a God of truth, and if you seek the truth with an honest heart, and you keep seeking until you find it and not just put yourself into a position of, “Well, who cares?” or something like that. But there was so much evidence. I mean it took me years to find some of it. But I’m grateful for the people who already were working on that background and providing different lines of evidence. So you became intellectually convinced. You could see philosophically, intellectually that the reality of God is not only experientially true or substantively true from your experience, but also there are good, rational archaeological, textual, all of these different reasons, everything in reality that points back to the Person of God and who He is.  Yeah. You had mentioned earlier that sometimes people question that there’s any evidence. As an atheist, sometimes looking back, you want to say there’s no evidence, or that’s oftentimes what I hear. “There’s no evidence for God.” But yet you’re telling me that there is prolific evidence for God, that it is wherever you look if you have eyes to see. And you took, it sounds like, a very painstaking, intentional path towards seeing, looking, and finding evidence. I’m curious. How would you respond to someone if an atheist just said, “There’s no evidence for God,” knowing what you know and experiencing what you have experienced? How would you respond to someone like that?  Philosophically, from the moment of my conversion, everything fell into place, in terms of how to explain the external universe plus my own existence as a sentient being. From this theistic standpoint, it’s like, “Oh! Now everything makes sense,” so that was an immediate change. But I wanted scientific evidence, and I wanted historical evidence. Now, I was planning to be an astrophysicist. Obviously, I can’t do that and become a biblical scholar at the same time. Not enough time in one’s life to do both well. But my younger brother did go on to do his PhD in physics. And he’s a solid believer now also, and he’s like, “The evidence is so clear, and the parameters for what it would need for life to exist in the universe, they’re so finely tuned. It’s just clear.” But my own area of research is especially in ancient historiography, so, going through what we can know about how things like the gospels were written and what we can know from external evidence how the material in the gospels fits in to what we can see archaeologically and so on. There’s just an abundance of evidence. And even when I was an atheist, I would not have been a Jesus myther. I mean the people who say that Jesus didn’t exist. I mean, you don’t have to believe God exists, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to say, “Okay, Jesus didn’t exist historically. His movement just sprang up out of thin air.” Or you could say, “Oh, okay. Mohammad didn’t exist.” “Actually, I don’t like the Bible. The Bible doesn’t exist.” That doesn’t work. But if Jesus did exist and you actually look at the evidence about Jesus, His contemporaries experienced Him as a miracle worker, and that’s attested not only in every level from the Christian witnesses about this, including some who had been not just skeptics but enemies of the Jesus movement but then came into the faith. It’s also attested by Josephus, the first century Jewish historian. It’s also attested by critics of early Christianity. And things like the site of Jesus’ tomb. That was so carefully preserved. I’m going into different lines of evidence, and people will say, “I dismiss this. I dismiss that,” but the evidence is really strong. But even if you dismiss this line of evidence, there’s another line of evidence, and there’s all sorts of other lines of evidence. But if we’re not looking for, say, okay, “I have to see God myself, or have my name written in the sky,” we’re saying, “Okay, where does the evidence point?” I think we’ve got plenty of evidence that should compel people to trust in the reality of God. Yeah. I think, in your story, at some point, you actually turned towards openness in a way. Just that little bit of openness, that 2% openness, where something came, and you were willing to see and experience reality for the way that it was. And I think you’re right, there has to be a willingness to even consider the possibilities, rather than shutting everything down.  You have an amazing story, Craig. Truly amazing to see where you were and where you’ve come, and I can’t imagine the number of lives that you’ve impacted by all of the research and all of the speaking and the thinking that you’ve done, and the living that you’ve done. Your life is an amazing testimony. If there’s a curious skeptic who is listening in and perhaps has a little bit of willingness. He’s curious. Or she is. To search or to look, what would you say to someone like that who might be listening today?  It never hurts to ask. That’s what it was in my case. It was just like, “Well, God if you’re there, please show me.” God may not show you the way you’re expecting, but it never hurts to ask. When we admit that it’s not something we can resolve on our own, when we ask for help, that’s a step towards God, and if you think there’s no God, it can’t hurt, but just in case, you might want to ask. I know reading scripture is probably very important in terms of a step of starting to look. I wonder if you had any words of wisdom for, if someone did pick up the Bible for the first time maybe, where would you encourage them to read? Or even apart from the Bible, any other books? If somebody says, “Okay, I’m willing to look at the evidence. Where should I look?” Do you have any suggestions either way?  Yeah. The gospels tell you about who Jesus is. Slightly different versions in the four of them, so you get to know about Jesus from different angles. I think that’s a great place to start. And for those who don’t know what the gospels are, could you tell them?  Yeah. The majority of scholars today recognize that the gospels fit the genre, the literary type, of ancient biographies, and actually in the early Roman Empire, that was the apex of the historiographic interest in the way ancient biography was written. And, to actually have multiple biographies of one person within living memory of that person, the way oral historiography defines living memory, that’s phenomenal. We have that only extremely rarely for any figures in antiquity, and we have that with the gospels. For the person of Jesus, right? They’re stories, the biographies of Christ?  Yeah. The biographies of Jesus in the Bible. So it’s like two thirds or three quarters of the way through the Bible, in what is, in the Christian Bible, called the New Testament. They begin the New Testament. And they’re Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?  Yeah. Yeah. Just for those who just aren’t familiar.  Yeah. I take too much for granted. When I was a young Christian, again, like I said, I didn’t really know how to read different literary types, and so my first time through Matthew, I was like, “This is great!” and then I got to the end of Mark, and Jesus gets crucified and rises again, and I’m like, “How often is this going to happen?” I didn’t realize it’s four different gospels. It’s not supposed to be in chronological order all the way through. Right. Yes.  In personal conversation, I can talk with people about the scientific questions, but I don’t speak as one whose PhD is in science. I speak as one whose PhD is in New Testament and Christian Origins, so I speak as a historian. But one book, I think that probably shows the best of where the scientific evidence has gone at the moment is by Stephen Meyer called Return of the God Hypothesis. I think that’s a really good case. In terms of historiography, because that’s where I work, there are so many books on a less academic level, not as heavily documented, but more readable for people who, you know, it’s not their discipline. I used to recommend a little book by F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable?, but there are so many other ones right now. So let’s turn the page, and I’m thinking now of the Christians who are listening who have skeptical friends that may or may not want to listen to the evidence. The atheist friends may have good or bad impressions of who Christians are. And I’m wondering how you could advise Christians in terms of how they can best engage with those who don’t believe. Do you have any words there?  Yeah. It kind of depends on where your skeptical friends are coming from. If they are, like I was, making fun of you, you can pray for them. And be nice to them. You never know what God might be doing in their hearts. But if you know your stuff and you can engage in intelligent conversation and answer some of the questions, that’s really important. I wanted that so much, and even after I became a Christian, I wanted that so much. I was able to find some people who could answer some of my questions. Actually, some ministers and some other kinds of churches than the one that I went to were able to answer of the questions because of the areas in which they were trained. But it helps, I think, to be able to answer people’s questions. But you’re not just dealing with an argument. You’re dealing with a person. And a person needs to be shown the love of God. It makes love a whole lot more believable if people can actually see it embodied in a world where sometimes love is hard to find or people have experienced deep brokenness, or I think sometimes my feelings were frozen. I didn’t want to deal with the feeling level, but we’re all people, and that’s part of who we are, too. So be patient. And sometimes people, they came from backgrounds of faith and were really hurt, and so they need to be shown something different. And sometimes, like me, they came from backgrounds of no faith, and they think that makes sense. Actually, it was faith. It was just faith in nothing, rather than faith in something, but they need to… It helps if they have somebody that they can trust to really answer them honestly, and dialogue with them if they’re open to it, or if they think maybe someday they do become open to it, they know who to go to, like the pastor who was really nice to me. And I’m also thinking of those family members of yours who were praying for you, and you didn’t even know. I think prayer can make a tremendous difference. It certainly did, I think, in your story. Not only others praying for you but you willing to take that first step of praying to God.  I don’t think my step was the first one. I think the Holy Spirit was probably dealing with me already, and I just didn’t recognize it yet. In closing here, Craig, is there anything else that you’d like to add? Or say? You mentioned the Holy Spirit. For those who that sounds like a very strange concept, but for you as a Christian, the Holy Spirit is God, and so I don’t know if you want to end with a word about the Holy Spirit or anything else that’s on your mind or heart?  Yeah. Because God is real, God does work in our hearts to show us His reality. And therefore, we can pray with confidence that God hears us, that God is going to work in people’s hearts. I think people still have a choice. Not everybody’s going to respond positively to God leading. We can see that pretty clearly in the Bible. But we can pray with confidence to a God who does show Himself and does work in the world, and sometimes I’ve been frustrated because at certain times in my life, there were certain people who wouldn’t listen to me, but found that even in dialoguing with them, what it helped me to do was to come up with answers that someday, somebody down the road would be asking the same questions. It’s like Jesus told about sowing the seed widely, and there’s different kinds of soil, and some are going to bring forth fruit and some aren’t, and you don’t know at the beginning which seed is going to bring forth fruit. Those guys who were out sharing their faith that day, on October 31, 1975, who shared with me the message of Christ, they may not have been the most educated people in some respects. They may not have been the most culturally contextually relevant to me in some other respects. But they were available. They were probably the only people available in that town who actually were willing to go out and engage people on the streets who would never set foot in a church, and God used them. God works in personal and powerful ways. He looks for those who are available, doesn’t He? And when our lives intersect with others, He can do amazing things. What an inspired story and what an inspiration you are to all of us, Craig. Thank you so much for coming and just offering so much to us, spiritually and intellectually, and so much for us to think about and really be challenged by. I love your story. Thank you so much for coming and telling it today.  Thank you so much, Jana. God bless you. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Dr. Craig Keener’s story. You can find out more about his books and his recommended reading in the podcast episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can 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. 

Former skeptic Andrew Sawyer lost faith in religion as a child and lost faith in humanity as an adult. He quickly realized that he still didn’t have answers for the questions of life and death. His search eventually led him back to God. Resources by Andrew: https://andrewsawyer.substack.com Resources mentioned by Andrew C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (specifically referenced book two in Mere Christianity “What Christians Believe”) C.S. Lewis Doodles YouTube channel Andy Stanley, It Came From Within Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Stories Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been a skeptic or atheist but who became a Christian against all odds. We all want our lives to matter, to mean something, to ourselves, to others, to someone. We’re all driven, at different points, to ask the question, “What is worth living for?” Is there more than just the daily grind or the pursuit of pleasure or power or stuff? Why this urge, this angst for meaning, to feel valued, worth something, going somewhere. Why do we feel that wasting time is meaningless, while investing time is meaningful. What is it in us that longs for something more?  After all, if we are merely just physical beings determined to act and react, to think and respond according to mere impulses and environmental pressures and instincts, why even ask the larger questions, the ones that lurk beneath the surface of physical motion? Are we really just cogs in a mechanical wheel with no particular direction. Former skeptic Andrew Sawyer found himself in a place, physically and existentially, to ask these big questions about himself, about life itself. Come listen to him tell his story of searching for what matters most. I hope you’ll also stay to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching, as well as his advice to Christians on how best to engage with those who don’t believe.  Welcome to the Side B Stories Podcast, Andrew. It’s so great to have you with me today!  It’s great to be here. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, where you live, maybe perhaps what you do?  Sure. My name is Andrew Sawyer. I live in the Atlanta area. I’m an aerospace engineer. I work for a large operator of airplanes. I manage the reliability for the fleet. That’s great! So why don’t we start back at your story. I know you were, at one time an atheist, and I wondered how those atheistic inclinations began. Tell me a bit about your family, your story growing up. Was God a part of your family life? Your community life? Tell me about all of that.  Okay. Yeah. So I grew up kind of moving all over the place. Every couple of years. My dad was really ambitious. He was always starting businesses and stuff like that, so I lived in a bunch of different states. I think I went to seven different schools before I finished high school. So we were always on the move. And as far as the family dynamics, my dad’s side of the family is really, really, really religious, so my grandfather went to Wheaton College, he was always very, very religious. So very moralistic, and there’s only one right way to do anything, and that sort of thing. And then on the other side, my mom’s side, the opposite. Basically a Wisconsin family, German/Jewish, always looking to have fun, party, out playing on boats and all that kind of stuff, not really interested in faith at all. But coincidentally, one of my mom’s older sisters had a conversion experience when she was just out of high school, and she decided to become a missionary, so she spent 35 years in Burkina Faso. So a little bit of influence on both sides. On the one side, very strict, moralistic grandparents, and then that influence from my dad, and then, on the other side, a much more permissive attitude, but then my aunt, who would visit us every few years and pester me about Jesus. So your mom and dad, obviously, grew up in very different traditions and understandings of God, but they married, and they had a family. So during the time when you were a child, your father was obviously very religious. You said rather moralistic. And your mom, did she come to believe in God because of her aunt or your father?  Yeah. My dad actually rebelled against my grandparents, who were extremely strict. Okay.  But they still dragged me to church. But we went to church with them sometimes, and it was the, you know, I’m wearing a suit when I’m 10 years old, that kind of thing. And my mom and dad, my mom was, in some ways, escaping from her family, so she went to a Bible college, and that’s where they met and so on. Oh, I see. Okay.  So they took us to church and stuff like that, but the thing about it was, aside from the moral part of it, there wasn’t really any substance within our family, of, “This is what our faith is about.” It was more, “This is how you should behave,” Okay. All right. So very disciplinary and focused, I guess. Rules and regulations and perhaps rituals of going to church.  Yes. Shame was a big part of my childhood. And just feeling not good enough, stuff like that. So I would imagine, if there was a perception of God, it wasn’t positive based upon your personal experience. Did you have any understandings of God or belief in God, that there was an actual God? Or was it just some kind of moral system that you really didn’t want to have anything to do with unless you were forced to do it?  Yeah. You know, I think I just kind of absorbed what, I guess, most people in my generation, at that age, absorb, which was, “If you act right, if you’re good, be good, God will bless you,” type of thing. So that’s what I thought. It didn’t really occur to me at the time, but it was really just about my behavior. And that’s what I was taught. So it was just much more of a moralistic thing than any kind of… I would say now my relationship with Jesus is much more about love than about punishment. To put it that way. Yeah, but I can see where, in a family that values discipline that it would be easy to transfer those thoughts of a Heavenly Father being somewhat vengeful if you’re not behaving in a certain way and that you would have a very different idea of who God is, and that your relationship is all based upon your own behavior.  Yeah, so I should mention I have a lot of memories of my whole family, basically, fighting in the car all the way to church. And then pretending the whole time that everything’s just fine. And then fighting all the way home. So that sort of thing. And then my parents got divorced as well, when I was 14 years old. So there was a lot of tension and conflict. And then balanced with strict moralism. So it was kind of a chaotic upbringing. And again, remember, moving every couple of years and having to be uprooted and start over and make new friends and stuff like that. So it is a unique childhood, I’d say. Yeah. It sounds like it was really quite different, quite difficult, rather. So as you’re moving along and you’re going through the motions, you’re having this disintegration of your family, walk us on forward from there.  Sure. So at that point, that’s when whatever faith I had, or beliefs I had about God, started to be challenged significantly. For me, when I had to uproot and move and change schools constantly, my family was really the only constant thing that I had, you know? And then to have that fall apart, it was like I had nothing really left. And so the thoughts that I had at the time, 14 years old, were, “Okay, if my parents went to church and tried to do all this stuff, and this is the result, then forget it. Forget the whole thing. I don’t want anything to do with any of this.” So that’s where I was. That’s where I spent high school and about the next ten years after that. So if you rejected what you had been taught, essentially, or raised with, you’re rejecting God and Christianity, but were you specifically embracing a particular worldview or particular identity, like atheism or agnosticism? How would you have thought of your world or reality around that time? What was religion?  Yeah. Religion was something I didn’t want to have anything to do with, so my interests took me elsewhere, so I got into partying and sports. There’s plenty of things to occupy a high schooler. Did you outright verbally reject God? Did you identify yourself as an atheist around that time? Or did you just kind of move on and just said, “I know what I’m not.” I don’t know exactly what I am, but I know I’m not that?  Yeah. I’ve always been a big reader and intellectual and stuff like that, but I never really got there with my faith until much later. So at the time, I just rejected it on the basis of my own experience and my own anger, and I didn’t really research for any better reason than that. And it worked for me. Right, right. It worked. This whole God thing didn’t work for your family and it wasn’t going to work for you. So you just kind of went on to life on your own, right?  Yeah. It was also quite convenient in high school to feel like I could just do whatever I wanted. So we were living in Green Bay, Wisconsin, at the time, and it was such a chaotic thing. I have three siblings, a brother and two sisters. My older sister chose to live with my mom, and my other siblings were forced to because of their age. I was the only one that lived with my dad. And there was a bankruptcy involved as part of the divorce, and we were living in an apartment, and I switched schools again, and I just wanted nothing more than to just get out of there. So when I was 16, I went on a… Some neighbors of mine felt bad for us, so they invited me on a canoe trip. So I went on this canoe trip for three weeks in the boundary waters in Canada, and when I came back, my best friend had joined the Air Force. So he said basically, “Hey, while you were gone, I joined the Air Force. It’s going to be awesome. You should do it, too.” So the next day I was at Hooter’s with the recruiter, and he was talking me into it. So I signed. I enlisted in the Air Force in August of 2001, one month before September 11 happened, with the hopes of never coming back to Green Bay, you know? Who knows what’s out there, but it’s going to be better than this. So I did that. But that was a big change of everything for me, to get out and go. So, like I said, I signed up for delayed entry at 16, and then I went to boot camp in July of 2002 and then finished all my training in March of 2003, and one week after I got to my duty station, President Bush declared war on Iraq. So I’m in a Special Operations wing in now a two-war front. So it was an interesting time. I can imagine. That would’ve been very, very challenging. It’s a strong time of upheaval worldwide. I would imagine it was a bit frightening. I presume that that kind of experience would affect your worldview, the way that you see reality, and- Well, you know, as I recall, September 11 really had a big effect, I think, on just the public consciousness of religion. And, for me, it was just more evidence that religion is a bad idea at the time. And I think that’s when a lot of the Richard Dawkins books began to come out and stuff like that. Yeah. Now you said you were an avid reader. Were you reading some of those new New Atheist books? Literature?  Actually, I was much, much too busy with my job and drinking to do much reading at the time. Which might have been a good thing. So finally I was away from what I thought were all my problems. Of course, most of them followed me. But it was a very transformative time for me. I feel like I didn’t really have any direction beforehand, as far as what I wanted to do. I just wanted to escape. And the military gave me a vision of what could be, and it was taught me that I was much more capable in a lot of ways than I had ever thought, and so on and so forth. So it was a very chaotic four years. I got out after four years. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything, really. And at this point in my story, it sounds like I’ve had it pretty rough, but I’ve got to say I’m really grateful for the difficulties that I had early on. I feel like I learned a lot of lessons much more quickly, much earlier in life, than a lot of people do. So, for example, moving every couple of years, I recognized really early that cultural norms are arbitrary. So I had no trouble recognizing, after experiences like that, that really I needed to come up with my own pace and figure out what I like and not really go along with the crowd. I was much less tempted to just go with the flow. So that’s one [UNKNOWN 19:38]. I would imagine it would make you a bit of an independent thinker in a sense, after you’ve experienced all those different cultures and ways of living. You have to decide for yourself what your life is about and what your interests are.  Right. And then also, as an outcome of being uprooted so often, I really got into books and novels and stories, and I think I read the Lord of the Rings when I was maybe eight years old. Stuff like that. So those were my friends. Well, books can be very good friends. Great companions. So you had gotten out of the military. You were having a more confident sense of self. And so what happened next in your journey?  So actually I think the real turning point for me was a deployment I went on in 2006. I finished my enlistment in July of 2006, so I went on a six-month deployment from January until June. It wasn’t quite six months, January till June, and while I was on that deployment, and leading up to it, I had had a couple of close calls with death. I laid a motorcycle down. Stuff like that. I wrecked a car. I got in some bar fights. And then, on this deployment, I remember contemplating my will. I had to do the out processing and go over my will. I’m 21 years old over there at time. And I remember just thinking, “This is really happening, and I’m really at risk. I’m not safe anymore.” And when I first got there and landed, when I first got involved with that kind of stuff… I don’t think people realize that there’s a blanket of safety. There’s this assumption of safety in America. Really bad things just won’t happen to me. Or when really bad things happen, it’s just kind of a one-off, one in a million. It’ll never happen to me. But when you’re in a place that people are actively trying to kill you, that’s not so. And I didn’t realize until I was there how significant that would be. So I got to thinking about my mortality and about what’s important. And then also, “What if I die?” I’m 21 or 22, early twenties, with all kinds of dreams and stuff like that. I’d make $15,000, $20,000 on a deployment, which I thought was worth going to the Middle East for six months to make, and you know, come home and buy motorcycles and stuff like that, but along this contemplation of my mortality, it just struck me as so foolish to risk my life for $20,000. Like, “So if I die here, then what do I have to show for it? Not much.” So that led me down this rabbit hole of, “Is there anything worth dying for really?” It can’t be my own stuff. Dying for my stuff would be stupid. Or dying for anything that only belongs to me is a pretty useless thing. So surely none of those things are worth living for, either. So I started down this path, and also, on that deployment, my sister gave me an iPod, and she had been attending Buckhead Church in Atlanta, so she gave me this iPod with all these Andy Stanley sermons on it. So it was kind of a perfect storm. All these realizations are kind of coming to a point, all at the same time, and I also have an iPod full of Andy Stanley. So we had a couple of sand storms while I was there. We were stuck in a tent for hours and hours. And I’m just listening to Andy Stanley and trying to figure out where he’s wrong. But the thing that struck me about him was… So at the time, I’m 21, 22 years old, trying to find out what it is to be a man. And I’m in an environment where manhood is about being tough, strong, and not taking anything from anyone, and get her done and carry your regrets around because there’s nothing else you can do with them. And the people that I was with, myself included, of course, we were living pretty hard. So I was making bad decisions. And I got involved with women and all that kind of stuff. So I had some regrets that I was carrying around. And when I listened to Andy. He was twice my age at the time. And I’m thinking, “How is it possible that this guy is so clean?” I just couldn’t believe it. Does that make sense? Like how does he not have this baggage that I have? I’m having a hard time just getting out of bed sometimes, and here’s Andy Stanley, and it seems like he’s got it all together and doesn’t have any problems. So that really struck me. And then somewhere along that whole season, I, for the first time, saw the picture of manhood that is represented by Jesus. And it’s completely different than everything that I believed about what real manhood was. It wasn’t about being strong and coming in power but being humble and coming in meekness. All these things. So there was this sharp contrast. And I began to see that, for example, humility requires much more strength than putting on a strong face, you know? And all these qualities that I found in Jesus were actually more difficult than what I thought being a man was about, being tough, things like that. So that started to turn my world upside down. So I think that was the first big thing that I was really wrong about. And I recognized I was way off. Does that make sense? Yes! So when you were listening to Andy give these sermons, were you learning about, not only, I guess, who he was and the kind of life that he led, but the Person of Jesus. Were you learning about Jesus through listening? Or were you reading the Bible for yourself? How was that information coming to you?  Yeah. I’m not sure whether I had a Bible there at the time. There was a little library on the base, where people had donated books. And I also got a copy of Mere Christianity. But I was just listening to Andy because I couldn’t sleep and just, like I said, trying to figure out where he was wrong. I couldn’t figure it out. But Andy is very practically minded, too, so there’s usually an action item with each message. So I found that very helpful, too. So I wasn’t necessarily trying to solve the philosophy first. This was kind of just the first attractive thing about the faith I had really ever seen. Prior to that, it was always just what people do in order to get blessings from God. And this was, “Wait a second. This is presenting something that you didn’t see before,” and it’s showing me that I was completely mistaken. And that really threw me for a loop. I bet. I would imagine that being in that kind of environment, where you are in the desert and you’re facing a lot of the big existential questions that, like you say, oftentimes we, in the safety of wherever we are, don’t often think about. We’re often distracted by the next thing or whatever it is we’re doing. But you were actually forced to be in a position, sitting in a sand storm, plus signing papers of potential risk for your life, that it was kind of forced on you to really think about the bigger questions. And sometimes that can be a blessing, although difficult. And obviously, your sister had taken some sort of step in her life towards faith because she was listening to someone who she thought had answers for you. Something to learn. And what’s also impressing me is that you were open, at that point. You were open to, not only listening, but also self discovering that perhaps you were wrong about a few things. And I think that speaks a lot to who you are. Oftentimes, we’re not willing to go there. If something doesn’t seem right or feel right to us or we don’t want to be impressed with a change. But you were willing to say, “Hey, something’s not right in me. He obviously has something. Jesus is different than I thought.” And evidently, it sounds like Jesus, in the Person that He is, His strength and humility, was attractive to you.  Yes. The main question that I was wrestling with at that time was, “Is there anything worth dying for?” So I got hurt over there. I broke my back. So when I got back, that was it for my military career. I spent the rest of the time out processing. But I think I got the answer, at that time that… Really, the only thing that I could think of that was worth dying for is love really. And just in contemplating that, I thought about, “Why is it that I do things? Why is it that I joined the military? Did anything.” Really, it all came back down to either trying to get love or give love somehow. I want people to like me. I want people to respect me. I want relationships. It all ultimately for me boiled down to people. And not stuff. Dying for stuff is a foolish thing. So I think that was biggest blessing from that season, is recognizing that, a really fundamental truth, and then also, the flip side is, if it’s really worth dying for, then it’s also worth living for. So my mission, as I assumed it at that time, was to figure out what that means. So I’m not necessarily focusing on the resurrection or on any of that stuff, or even on the ten commandments or the moral law. I’m really just interested in, “How can I love as well as possible?” because I thought that was the way to have the most meaningful life. Does that make sense? Yes, yes. You were looking for, really, the point of life, of what matters. And it really is about love and relationships and truth.  But I had a lot of baggage, too, at the time, and a lot of regrets and bad habits and all kinds of stuff. But that’s how it began. So, as we’re talking here, when you were considering the Person of Jesus, were you considering Him as the Person of God? Or just a figure in history? Or a good example of humility and meekness and strength?  Yeah. I don’t think I really turned to really look at Jesus as a whole, aside from just this little interest I had as far as love goes, until I read Mere Christianity. And that was a huge deal for me. Tell me about that.  Yeah. So I had read the Narnia books when I was a kid. I remember being in second grade and telling my dad they should make movies out of these things, that sort of thing. And so they had this little mini library where… You know, people sent books and Girl Scout Cookies and all this stuff, so there’s this little stack of books, and Mere Christianity was in there, so I got my hands on it, and I think it was book four of Mere Christianity? I think the subtitle is “What Christians Believe.” I read that, and I recognized that I hadn’t even been exposed… I may have been exposed. I had never noticed any of those things before. If I had made a list of what I thought Christians believe, none of those things were in the chapter. So what was in the chapter that surprised you of what Christians believe and who they are?  Well, he does a great job of cutting through all the controversial topics and really getting down to the basics, that Christianity is a process of becoming a new kind of man, of going from death to life, and he’s even got an essay in one of his other collections called, “Nice People or New Men?” And it was just a completely different category for me. I hadn’t thought of it that way, as far as the possibility of God getting involved with me and transforming me. I didn’t even know that was on the table. I thought it was about getting to heaven and being good, you know? It was about tin men coming to life, right?  Yeah. It’s a full transformation of something that once was that becomes something so much more than you thought possible.  By the way, if I can just mention, there’s a fantastic YouTube channel called C.S. Lewis Doodle, and the entire book is not only read but drawn out as it’s read. So, if anybody’s interested in that, I highly recommend it. Okay, and we will include that in our episode notes, too, the link for that. So you were finding that Christianity was something very different than what you thought it was and that you were finding yourself attracted to a God who could transform your life because evidently, you had, like you say, some behaviors and many regrets, and that you were looking for a different way of thinking and doing life. Now, I’ll put on my skeptic’s hat for a moment and just say, “Well, that sounds like it’s something that you might have embraced because it sounds like it works for you, or something that might give you the kind of life you were looking for.” Obviously, you thought it was the kind of belief that would be worth living for. So what it made it so compelling? As an intellectual, you said you are attracted to books. You’re an aerospace engineer. You’re very bright. I’m sure that issues of truth came into play, in terms of, well, perhaps God does exist, and here’s why. Was it just an existential kind of journeying?  So, just to backtrack a little bit, I’d say, with my parents’ divorce, I lost my faith in religion. And when I was deployed, actually, I lost my faith in humanity at the time. I forgot to mention that, but this is very important. I was involved in both Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and I had a different viewpoint than a lot of guys. I was a crew chief on airplanes, so I got to see a little bit bigger picture, Like from a big picture perspective. Like, how is this going to play out? And just seeing war first hand and the destruction of it and just the stupidness of so many of the things. I used to think, when I was a kid, that grown-ups had things under control and figured out, but it didn’t take long for me to be dispelled of those notions through experience. So I really just lost my faith in humanity at that time. And the idea that we, as the human race, were capable of solving sin, really. But also death. We’ve got these big problems, sin and death. So I was wrestling with that as well. I think the sin and death piece came a little bit after the contemplation about love. But just this idea of we’re all bound by this human condition of sin and death, and it doesn’t matter what amazing technology we invent or how we structure the world or any of that stuff. None of it matters if we’re all going to die anyway. So I started to recognize that. Those really are the fundamental problems I think that everybody is trying to solve in one way or another, whether they recognize it or not. So you were coming face to face, through your experience of seeing the failures and the brokenness of humanity, the horrors of war- Seeing caskets come back. I truly can’t imagine what that must have been like. I can’t even pretend to put myself in someone’s shoes like that.  It just further hardened my resolve that, like, “If I get home, I don’t care how difficult it is, I’m going to do it right.” So in other words, “I’ve got to figure out this thing.” “The days of me just living for myself, now that I know what I know, that’s over. I can’t go back to just blissful ignorance.” So you started putting the pieces together. You were reading Mere Christianity. You were trying to make sense of what you were hearing and seeing and reading. And it sounds like that you started to make steps towards finding what it meant to live well, what it meant to live for more than yourself. I would imagine that seeing the brokenness of humanity in the world, as well as feeling the brokenness in your own self, that there was some attraction to Jesus in terms of finding that Christianity is the belief system, or the reality or the offer, really, of forgiveness. It’s not something that you can be good enough to make up for everything you’ve done or will do. How did the Gospel come into play in terms of your accepting this Christianity, Jesus as being the true or real or life-giving way to live?  Yeah. I think of it as kind of a two-sided coin. So on the one hand I had no trouble at all acknowledging that I was a sinner. There were even times, I think, that I probably bragged about my sin and stuff like that. So that wasn’t a hard sell. And then also coming to terms with the reality of death. That wasn’t a stretch at all for me, either. So that side of… you know, you’re lost. And there’s nothing that you can do under your own power to do anything about sin and death, really. They’re going to take all of us down. So that side was easy for me to embrace. But the other side of, but you’re also, at the same time, much more loved than you ever thought. You’re so much more valuable and loved than you ever even imagined. So I still wrestle with it. I still remind myself of both of those things. Sometimes, when I get puffed up, I use the negative side to humble myself. But then, in the course of humbling myself, I use the positive side to keep me from self pity. Does that make sense? Mm-hm.  So I think that was a bit of a gradual process. There was another huge turning point that I can get to, but I want to say a few words… After I got out of the military, I went straight to college. I went to the University of Wisconsin. And I’m a nontraditional student at this point. I’m a combat veteran, 22 years old, which is old for a freshman. And I just did not fit in at all. And no one understood me at all. And it was so hard for me. My whole life in the military was all 100% about the mission, and everything that I did was for the service of something much greater than myself. But when I got to college, it really is I think the most selfish season of life. You have to be selfish. All of my time was spent on stuff that only mattered to me. And that was really hard. And then, as far as my faith goes, I tried to plug in and meet other believers, so I went to Campus Crusade. I got involved in Campus Crusade. I joined a Bible study and stuff, but man, I just did not fit in at all. So it was a big struggle for me. But the turning point for me, as far as how the whole thing fit together for me, in 2007, my first summer of liberty, really, for five years, me and my best friend who I had joined the Air Force with, and we both went back to Wisconsin, so that first summer, I said, “Why don’t we take a road trip out West, and we’ll go visit all the national parks and all this stuff.” I thought that would be good for both of us. So I took him on this road trip, and I had my iPod with all the sermons and stuff like that, so we went all the way from Wisconsin to San Francisco, up through Canada on the way, stopping at every national park, and from San Francisco, he flew home. So, as soon as he left, I switched from listening to music in the car to listening to these sermons. I was just trying to figure out my next steps. So I was listening to this series of Andy Stanley called, “It Came from Within,” and it’s about the sin that gets lodged in your heart and the verse, I think it’s from Proverbs, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” And so I thought, “We’ll see what he has to say.” So I’m listening to these sermons. He’s got one about anger, and I thought, “Oh, that’s not really me.” And he had one about greed. And no one thinks they’re greedy. But then he had one about guilt, and it really just rang my bell. It’s like he was saying, “If you are dealing with guilt. If you have this burden of regrets, the way you deal with that is by reconciling with the people that you’ve wronged,” right? So I thought, “I’m with you on the guilt. I feel the burden. But that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” So he said, “Make a list of the people you’ve wronged and call them, if you can, and reconcile.” And I thought, “I’ve wronged a lot of people. What’s the use in me calling people that I’ve wronged a few years ago and saying, ‘Hey, I just want to apologize for whatever I did to you and remind you of what a bad person I am.’” So that’s what I thought. So I was wrestling with this. So two weeks pass, and I get to Colorado, and I had kind of run out of money by that point, so I didn’t want to pay the $30 a night for a campsite at the Rocky Mountain National Park, so I went outside of the park, and I had a GPS. I parked the car at a trail head. I hiked twenty miles into the Roosevelt National Forest and was just kind of wrestling with this idea of reconciling and just my reluctance to do it. So I was out there for a few days, and one morning, I woke up, and it was a beautiful day, and there was this mountain maybe three or four miles away from my campsite. I think it’s about 11,500 feet high, and I thought, “I’m going to climb to the top of that today,” and I didn’t think it would take too long. I’m a tough guy. I’ve been doing this all summer. So I didn’t even wear a shirt. I left my GPS in my tent. So I’ve got some tobacco and a bottle of water and a knife. I go hike up the top of this mountain, and it’s just stunning, so I had the camera with me. I’m taking panoramic shots. I eat my snack. And I’ve got nothing else to do, so I’m up there for maybe an hour or two, and before I realized what was happening, clouds had rolled in and completely obscured the sun. And that was the only thing that I had to get my bearings from, because I was up on a mountain top going in circles. So now I didn’t know which direction I had come up from, because I didn’t have the foresight to make a mark or something like that. Just arrogance. So now I’m on the top of this mountain, and I don’t know where my campsite is, so I pick a direction and just start hiking down for about 30 minutes, and nothing looks familiar, so I turn around, and I climb all the way back to the top. By the way, at 11,000 feet, this is no easy task. I’m back at the top. I look around, try another direction, go down another 30 minutes, 30 minutes back up, so I’m three or four hours into at this point, and now it’s starting to get dark. I don’t know where I am. There’s no trails. I don’t have a shirt on. Oh, my!  And it had been raining that week, so everything was wet. I couldn’t start a fire. So I realized that I have to set up my camp for the night, so what I wound up doing was I found a big spruce tree with these really broad boughs. I went underneath it, and I dug a hole in the dirt with a stick and then made a huge pile of the dirt and pine needles from the tree, climbed up underneath it, and covered myself with the pile for the night. And hoped that I wouldn’t freeze to death. And I think it was probably about 45, 50 degrees that night and windy. And I did not sleep at all, but I did think about whether or not I was going to call the people I had wronged and reconcile with them. Honestly, I was ready to die. At that point. So there was this belief that had crept in that my problems were much too big for me to ever really get through. The best I could hope for was maybe dealing with half of them or something. So I’m lying underneath this spruce tree, shivering, hoping I don’t freeze to death, saying, “God, if this is it, this is it. That’s fine with me. But if You get me out of here quick and easy, I will do this stupid thing that You want me to do.” And at the time, I thought, “I will prove You wrong. If You want me to prove You wrong, show me how to get back to my tent. I’ll go. I’ll make the phone calls. And that will be the end of that,” right? So the sun comes up, I get up, I brush myself off. I get up to the top of the mountain, and I pray. So I get down, bow my head, close my eyes, pray that thing, “Lord, You know the deal. If You get me out of here quick and easy, I’ll make the phone calls. Amen.” I lift up my head, and I can literally see my tent. I had a red rain fly on it, and a tree blew and swayed, and there’s my tent. So I went straight down, straight to the tent, and went to sleep. And then, when I got up, I packed everything up, hiked back to the car, and drove straight to Popeye’s Chicken. It was my 23rd birthday, August 9, 2007, and I started making phone calls. So I think this was the biggest turning point for me because this was the first time that I obeyed something that I did not agree with. And I already had mentioned that Andy’s always done a great job of having an action item. This week, let’s do this, you know? So I did it. And of course I called the ex girlfriend that I was sure hated me the most out of all the people on my list, so that I could very quickly put this thing to rest, but she apologized to me. First off, she couldn’t believe that I had called, and then, through tears, I’m apologizing to her, and then she says, “I think I’m just as guilty as you are, and I’m so sorry,” and you know. “Okay, I was wrong about that one, but I’m sure it’s a one off.” All the way down the list. I called about thirty people. And every single one of them forgave me. So again I was proven completely wrong. Not just a little bit wrong but 180 degrees wrong. So that is really where I think my faith got serious. Because I thought, “If I could be wrong about something like that, what else am I wrong about?” So what I did is I started studying the Bible, and then when I’d bump into something that I didn’t like, I would do it and find out that I was wrong. Oh. Wow.  So through that process, I found that, for me, when I bumped into something in the Bible that I don’t like and then I start making excuses about it and saying, “Here’s the reasons why I’m not going to do what this says,” I recognize that those are actually the signs of conviction, the symptoms of conviction, and those are the big opportunities, the big turning point opportunities, so I started just doing all of them. And that, more than anything else, more than any of the grieving or philosophizing or anything, is what really opened me up to it, because I recognized that I wasn’t qualified to sit as the judge of what is true and false and right and wrong and worth doing and not worth doing or any of that stuff. If I can be wrong about such basic things like that. And by the way, when these people forgave me, that burden that I had was just lifted off. And I thought, just the day before, I was thinking about how it would take years to work through all of that, years and years and years, but here it is, all done in a couple of hours. And I just can’t get over the epiphany that that was for me. What amazing transformation it sounded like. What a difficult process in a way, but like you say, what a sudden and amazing transformation, and really, it confirmed that what you were seeking and believing was true. And I imagine that it would also make you think of how God could forgive in such an amazing way, too. All of whatever it is that you had done, or whatever you were feeling guilt about, that all of that could be washed away in a nanosecond, really. And also restore. Restores. Yes, yes. So with that repentance comes forgiveness and restoration and that life that you were looking for. So I imagine, at the end of the day then, you have found the life that is worth living, or that there is something worth living for greater than yourself. And you’ve found that in the Person of God, I presume, through Jesus. Is that right? It sounds like you- Yeah, absolutely. … yeah.  So I began to take the biblical language to heart. So essentially what it says about this stuff is I wasn’t just wrong about what real manhood is. I was deceived. And I wasn’t just mistaken about my problems and how difficult they would be. I was deceived. Right? How do I find out what else I’m deceived about? Well, the only way I knew how was to do this. Study the Bible, find something that I don’t like, recognize the symptoms of conviction, and then blast through and obey and see what happens. And by doing that, I was, I guess, gradually, step by step, undeceived. Does that make sense? Yes.  And I wish there was more out there on this sort of thing, because I think you can spend a lot of time contemplating truth claims without actually changing your behavior at all. And I don’t know… I could’ve probably gotten stuck in that for a long time, too, but the point at which the rubber hit the road for me was obedience. And Jesus Himself says, “Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny himself and take up his cross daily.” So that’s what I’ve been trying to do. I believe that adage that it’s not just about information. It’s about transformation. Right? You read for transformation. You seek towards transformation, towards that which is true and life that is truly life. And what an amazing story, Andrew. I’m thinking of those who might be listening. Perhaps there’s someone who, as earlier in your life, has some experiences that were really not their fault. Some of it was. We’re all guilty in some ways, that we bring life and its consequences upon ourselves. But you also experienced a lot of moving around, a lot of difficulties, the horrors of war. A lot of things that might push you away from God.  But you came through that and towards Him. And I’m wondering, if there was someone listening who says, “I just can’t believe because of everything that’s happened to me.” … But you also read some things that pointed you back towards truth and towards God. I just wonder what would it be or what would you suggest for those who might be curious enough to be open, to listen or to learn?  I would say be as honest as you possibly can. And genuine. With yourself. The things that you believe, are you really sure about them? Could you be wrong? Also, look at what you’re living for. What is your mission? Is it success or wealth or fame or any other thing that you’re going to lose when this life ends? …You know, the thing about my difficult childhood and all these experiences, of course I didn’t enjoy it, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but after following Jesus, I don’t know how long it took, but He’s really redeemed those things. And I think back on some of the traumatic things that happened when I was a kid, and then I’m reminded of the lessons that those things taught me. Like the stuff that happened to me, it got me to the point where I recognized that love was the only thing worth living for. None of it was enjoyable, but I’m so grateful for it. So I’d say you never know. And so with, “I have so many problems, it’ll take years and years and years, and it’ll be so difficult to deal with them.” The only way to know really how difficult something will be is to do it. I found that it’s actually easier than I thought. And especially after time after time after time, me being proven wrong and scripture and principles outlined by Jesus, the self-sacrificial love and all this stuff being proven right every time I apply it in my life, that’s the basis, really, of my relationship is… You know, God even identifies Himself often as, “I’m the Lord who brought you out of Egypt,” and stuff like that, so I feel the same way about my past. He’s the Lord that not only redeemed me out of a lot of chaos and brokenness but also redeemed the chaos and brokenness itself. Yeah. I think there’s just a tremendous difference between the moralistic, more legalistic form of religion that you encountered as a child, to wanting to obey Someone Who loves you and has your best interest in mind and wants to bring you out of deception and out of slavery to your own problems and bring you into a life that’s worth living. And you do it because of love and because you trust, because they have your, again, best interest in mind. It’s a very different way of looking at God and at Jesus. It’s not just religion. It’s a relationship of trust and love.  Right. So, thinking about those Christians who are listening and who want to impact those who are pushing away from perhaps their misconceptions like you did at one time, their misconceptions of God and religion and Christianity. You said you thought Christianity was one thing, and then you realized it’s something totally different than you what you thought it was. How can you encourage us as Christians to live and love or engage with those who don’t believe in a way that’s compelling, like the person of Jesus? Yeah. I think it’s really a lot less complicated than a lot of people assume. I found it is really just about trying to love people as much as I can. And I haven’t had a whole lot of success with outright evangelism. I’ve tried, but I have had some opportunities to really show up and love people through really difficult situations. There’s a verse that says it’s God’s kindness that brings us to repentance. And really that’s what brought me to repentance. It wasn’t the fear of condemnation or something like that, so I think kindness and gentleness go a long way. Actually, gentleness brings to mind… One of my favorite passages is actually in 2 Timothy. It’s chapter 2, the second half of the chapter. Beginning in verse 23, it says, “Do not take part in foolish and stupid arguments because you know they produce quarrels, and the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but must be kind and able to teach, not resentful,” and it goes on to speak of the condition of deception that the world is in. So I’ve been very careful. This is an example of the way the Lord redeemed my conflict with my moralistic grandparents. I’ve been very careful not to be like that to other people. “You’re wrong. You’re going to hell. You need to repent.” That sort of thing. And I’ve put most of my chips more on the love side of the table. I think you’re pretty safe there. I think scripture says also that they’ll know us by our love, that we are Christians by our love, so I think your words are well ordered and well grounded. So, Andrew, you have really opened yourself up today and given us an amazing story of transformation. I love the fact that you were willing, although you rejected all of it from the beginning, that you can look back and see that perhaps you rejected something that we all kind of reject. We reject the malapplication of religion and moralistic legalism and we reject a lot of things that others reject. But yet you embraced what was actually real and that you were willing to be seen. You were willing to see that you were wrong about some things, and you put your pride down. But you found life at the end of it. You found that thing that you were actually looking for all along. So I just appreciate your story, and I know that many will benefit from it, so thank you for coming on to tell it today.  Absolutely. It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. You’re so welcome. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Stories Podcast to hear Andrew Sawyer’s story. You can find out more about Andrew and the resources he mentioned with C.S. Lewis in the podcast episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our Side B Stories website at SideBStories.com. I hope you enjoyed it, and if so, that you will continue to follow, rate, review, and share our podcasts 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. 

From a non-religious home, former atheist Ian Giatti thought God was a character of fiction and fantasy like Santa Claus.  His mind slowly changed as he began to realize the reality and truth of Jesus. Ian’s Website: https://iangiatti.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 but who became a Christian. You can see these stories and more at our Side B Stories website, www.sidebstories.com.  One of the most common objections you’ll hear for rejecting belief in God is a pervasive sense of brokenness and apparent evil in the world, that we wouldn’t see and experience so much pain around us and in our own lives if God was real. The world and our world would and should look much different. Although this objection is common, interestingly, in my research with former atheists, the problem of evil did not register as highly as I thought it would. While 26%, about a quarter, thought suffering in the lives of others was a reason to dismiss God, only 16% said that personal pain led to disbelief. However, pain, when it is felt, it is felt quite personally, and when it is present, it can play a significant role in forming perceptions and understanding of God. It can cause us to ask questions. Where is God? Why didn’t God show up? Why did God allow this to happen? Who is God? Our expectations, however shaped, crumble in disappointment, giving us no apparent option except to embrace a reality without God, or so it is thought.  It has been said that beauty and pain run on parallel tracks throughout all of our lives. This is a stark reality we must all face. The question is how we must make sense of all that we see and experience in the world and in our lives, of both brokenness and beauty.  As an atheist, Ian wrestled with these large intellectual and existential questions. I hope you’ll join me to hear him tell his journey from disbelief to belief in God and then stay to hear his advice to curious skeptics or even former Christians in rethinking their faith, as well as advice on how best to engage with who don’t believe. Welcome to Side B Stories, Ian. It’s so great to have you!  Well, Jana, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners can know a little bit about who you are, why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself?  Sure. My name’s Ian Giatti. I work in digital media. I have a family of about four kids. Sorry, I just lost count. Wife and four kids, including a newborn, so that makes us a little on the tired side. We’re out here living in Texas, enjoying life, and trying to just walk with the Lord every day. Wonderful, wonderful! Four kids, including a newborn. No doubt, you’ve got a very busy household!  A very busy household. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I’m an empty nester, so I’m on the opposite end of that spectrum, but I do miss those days. There’s nothing better than a house full of kids to bring life to your life.  Yeah. I can just say a big thank you to my wife, because she makes it all go, so I’m grateful for her. Wonderful. Well, you’re with us here today because you used to be an atheist, but you’re no longer. You actually are a Christian. So why don’t you start us back, so we have a better idea of how your atheism was formed. Just starting from the beginning. Tell me about the house in which you grew up. Tell me about your family. Was church a part of that picture? Was there any belief in God? What kind of heritage were you handed as a child?  Yes. I always tell people I grew up in a loving secular home. Both my parents, who did the best they could, were great parents overall. Loved me. Did everything they could to support me. I had an above-average childhood. I was in the entertainment industry as a young boy, got to go travel places and see things and do stuff, and boy, it was a blast! My upbringing was awesome. And I think that that kind of throws people off. Because most people think of atheists, former atheists, as, “Oh, well something bad must have happened to you,” or, “You must have seen the dark side of things too early,” or what have you. And that wasn’t really the issue with me. We grew up in… It was a non-religious household, but we celebrated Christians, celebrated Hanukkah. We would pray from time to time, even though I don’t think any of us, parents included… we kind of really understood all of that, right? But we just kind of figured, “Well, that’s kind of what people do.” And I remember I have photos of my childhood where I would be on my knees praying. I don’t know why I was doing those things. I didn’t go to church with any regularity, rarely at all. But again, that wasn’t because my parents were against it or anything else. We just enjoyed being a family, and that was kind of our sanctuary, really. And I think it was… The journey through childhood. I see it in my own kids, too. You get past a certain age where you have that childlike faith or understanding or belief in what you’re told, and then you which to go, “Wait a minute. I have a question. Wait a minute, how come this?” And I think I started receiving more frequently unacceptable answers to my questions. And yeah, that was no one’s fault. It wasn’t my parents’ fault. It wasn’t teachers or people around me. For various reasons. I don’t think people were prepared to discuss theological truths with a child. Generally speaking. At least outside of the church. Did you have any interaction with any religious people? Were they in your world at all? Where did you grow up?  I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California. Okay.  So relatively safe, middle class neighborhood. Really just kind of like an average childhood. I had it pretty good, looking back. Were there any Christians in your world at all?  You know what’s funny? In my area, there seemed to be more friends… My friends at school… It felt like there were more Jewish people than Christians who practiced, who went to church, who led overtly Christian lives. I felt like I had more Jewish friends. Yeah, we weren’t any religion at all. I went to plenty of Bar Mitzvahs, all those types of events. I was familiar with going to synagogue with friends. I rarely went to church, except for maybe Christmas, because my extended family did so. But I’ll tell you a funny story: My real first encounter in my memory. When I was 9 years old, roughly 9, I got to take a trip with my mom out to Italy to visit my grandfather, and my grandfather had led a pretty exciting and kind of interesting life, and he was very bold, and when we got there, my mom kind of explained, “Oh, your grandfather might say some things and just ignore him.” And I remember specifically arriving in Italy. I’m like, “Oh, this is cool!” I’m still a 9-year-old kid. We get to my grandfather’s house, and I remember one of the first things he asked me is if I knew Jesus. And I’d never heard that question before. I’m like, “What do you mean?” I know about Jesus. I know who Jesus is, right? But looking back, I finally understood, especially when I got saved, I realized my grandfather was preaching at me. And he was using theological terms. He was using “born again.” He was using things I had never heard. And to be completely honest with you, it was a little bit terrifying because… and I get that now. Because you have someone who obviously found the truth, right? Met God. Had one of those God encounters, and he just wanted to share it with his grandson, and yet I’d never had that one-on-one encounter where biblical truths were being thrown at me. So that cause a lot of… as it does at many family Thanksgivings and other holidays, right? It caused a lot of consternation and disruption, and eventually we kind of smoothed it out and we went on and enjoyed our time. But I remember now specifically that being my real first childhood experience with the truth of Jesus. Not knowing Him, not believing, just hearing something biblically sound about the Person of Christ. But it sounds like it wasn’t something that drew you in. It was actually something that pushed you away at the moment, because probably you had no paradigm for that kind of thinking or language or taking Jesus any more seriously than a baby in a manger perhaps at Christmas time.  Yeah! I didn’t have any kind of paradigm. And I’ll tell you what, this kind of actually segues into another childhood story, which is almost the flip side of that story, which is my paradigm of someone who was always watching over me, judging whether I was doing good or bad, and planning to reward or punish me on those things, my only paradigm as a child was Santa Claus. Sure.  That’s all I really knew. And I believed. I mean I was a hard and fast believer in Santa Claus for my very young childhood because I just knew it, and Christmas always had such a special place in my heart, and I just remember the joy of Christmas morning. Not just the presents. Of course every kid likes the presents, but even now, you know there’s something in the air, right? Just something changes, and people, they act differently, and family gathers, and there’s just a shift. And I remember enjoying it so much, and I believed. I believed that there was a man that broke into our houses and left gifts for 6 billion children, or 4 billion children in the world, in one single night. I believed it. Until I didn’t. And I realized, “Oh, this is false!” But it wasn’t just the realization of that. The hardest part was that I had been told a falsehood by the people I trusted the most, who again were just doing what parents do, right? Sometimes we tell our kids things that aren’t full truths, half-truths sometimes or outright lies, in order to, in our view, protect them. Or maybe to make things easier or better for them. And it’s one of those very parental things that parents sometimes do. And I understand that to an extent. I do. And I’ve forgiven them for that. I never held that against my parents, but what it also showed me is that, if this Santa Claus paradigm is totally false, then there’s no reason for me to even think that this whole religion paradigm would be true, either. Because it just seemed like a bigger version of that lie, on a grander scale, and on a scale, by the way, that coincidentally governments exploit and other people exploit to oppress people and yada, yada, yada. And this is again… I’m probably an 11-year-old boy, maybe 12. Things started to click really quickly for me. I’m like, “Oh, wait a minute! Okay, so there isn’t any of this, and it’s just all kind of something people choose to believe in. Okay. No problem.” I wasn’t angry about it, but I also realized, “Okay, well. Let’s just start over.” So that led to a skepticism that really took root from a very young age. So as you were deciding what you didn’t believe. You didn’t believe in Santa Claus, and you didn’t believe this wishful thinking of God that many people did, this bigger lie, did you appreciate as a middle schooler or even high schooler what you were embracing as any kind of a paradigm of belief? If it’s not religion, what is it? Is it science? Were you thinking, “I’m too smart for that.” What were you buying into in terms of a worldview for yourself? Or were you even giving it any thought?  Well, I don’t want to over play it as a 16-year-old, doing what 16-year-old boys do, which is a whole lot of dumb stuff. But the more I reflect on my time as a teenager, I think what I started learning to do is live off of my intuition, of my intuitive mechanism, and I started to trust that more. Because it seemed to be steering me, generally speaking, in the right direction, around potholes, away from dangerous things or people, right? And so I began to trust that. So that’s a form of self-trust. I’m trusting in myself. But also there’s not anything innately wrong with trusting your intuition, I think. Like our conscience, God gives us these things as part of our spirit, right? Our soul makeup. To kind of navigate, because it’s a dangerous world, you know? And so I just kind of lived by that, and like most people, as I went into my later high school years and toward college, I thought I was a pretty good person. “I don’t see what the hubbub is about about hell, guys. I know some people who are going there for sure, but definitely not me. I’m better than that. I’m far too qualified for heaven to ever think about eternal judgment.” So those are vague kind of religious notions you’re talking about here, but you had rejected religion and the reality of God at this point. So when did you really start thinking in terms of identifying as an atheist? Was it around this time, in college, or…?  So in college, I read everything. I was a voracious reader. I loved reading even from a very early age, and in college, you’re essentially introduced to a buffet of ideologies. Sample a little bit of this, sample that. Put some on your plate. Mix it with that. Figure out what combination you like, and then enjoy, right? And that’s what I was doing. I was reading all sorts of stuff and picking and choosing what rung true to me, what had the veneer of truth, at least, and I decided, “Okay, I’m going to piece it together myself, and I’m going to create my own thing. And that’s what most people do, and that’s what has been the heart of idolatry from the very beginning. They create this own thing, and they say, “No, this is the thing that’s true, that finally sums up how I see the world, and that’s what I’m going to worship.” And that’s how I pieced it together. And as I did that, especially venturing into more kind of intellectualized ideologies, Zen Buddhism, these kinds of things, I realized, “Okay, well you’re living in this head space of all these intellectual ideas. There’s no room, really, at that point for a God who isn’t seen. There’s no room for a theology that says, ‘Well, all these things are true, but you can’t taste, touch, smell, or see them.’” And so I became a materialist, for all intents and purposes, who said the only thing that is true is what I can encounter with my five senses, that I can verify right now. Beyond that, there is no truth. And that began to coalesce pretty quickly for me. And it colored my relationships. It colored how I approached college itself and the future, so it was pretty significant. So yeah, absolutely, beliefs and ideas have consequences. How did it affect your life in terms of, if you are a strict materialist, then that means there are a lot of things about yourself that aren’t necessarily true that we take for granted. You talked about your intuition in terms of steering you which way is right and wrong, or that sort of thing, but you lose a lot of things about yourself when you’re a strict materialist, in terms of freedom of choice, for example, or conscience, or the sense of this immaterial me inside who’s making these choices. Did you think that deeply about it? Or did you just say, “I’m a strict empiricist. If I can’t see, feel, hear, or smell, or touch it, I can’t verify it’s true, so everything else is out the window.” I mean, did you really live with those kind of stark implications of your worldview?  I did. It wouldn’t be till years later, till after I put my faith in Christ, I began to read all these great Christian thinkers who were so articulate in bringing up what you just said articulately yourself. About the loss of so much humanity if our existence is restricted to strict materialism. Boy! It’s like having the cover of a book and the pages in it, but there’s nothing written on it! It’s the software and the hardware, and so no, I didn’t get the distinction because… Look, it’s so obvious even then, just by the fact I was thinking about these things in thoughts that are immaterial by nature, it should have occurred to me, that, “Wait a minute! Hold on! That’s not true,” but I think what happens, and we don’t get into this a lot when we get into Christian philosophical matters, is that the desires, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life had so begun to take root in me that my desires… Now, I was putting those in the driver’s seat, and really saying, “You know what? I’m going to live my life. I’m going to try to be nice to people. But at the end of the day, I want what I want,” and I think that once people understand that’s really the fruit of that kind of philosophical stance, I think there’s a lot to think about there. For sure. Yeah. When you were living your life like that and just observing the world and learning a lot, were you making any observations about the brokenness in the world? Or things that aren’t quite as they should be. Or maybe I shouldn’t be making the choices that I’m making. Or those kinds of things? Or was everything just kind of status quo, everything great, and life is good without God. God’s irrelevant, and everything. Those intuitions that we have sometimes kind of haunt us at times if we intuit that something’s not quite the way it ought to be.  Yeah. I knew the world was broken. From a very early age. So people telling me something, I immediately thought, “Well, I’ve been lied to by my parents. There’s no reason to believe you’re telling me the truth about anything,” so I think I felt like it went all the way down. In other words, the corruption of the world, which I later discovered to be a biblical thought, because it’s a biblical truth. The corruption of the world went all the way down, and as I grew older, and as I dove more into following politics and geopolitical affairs, I was very, very politically involved as far as the news and everything. I went into the news media later on. But I’ve always been a follower of just how the world operates, the currency of the world, right? And it was hard to get away from the idea that it wasn’t just a little bit corrupt, and it wasn’t corrupt in certain areas, but it was totally corrupt, and not just superficially but fundamentally, all the way down. And when you acknowledge that truth, which it is a truth, it started to really shape how you engage with the world. And so, in my early twenties, which is where I believe we are in the timeline, before this significant life event, that’s really how I came at the world. You’re corrupt, everyone is corrupt, their thinking is corrupt, their behavior is corrupt, so I, too, am now free to engage in that corrupt thinking and that corrupt behavior. Wow. That’s pretty transparent and very sobering, to really think that that’s the reality of the world. No matter what perspective you’re coming from, but it sounds like you were sober-minded enough to not only acknowledge it but actually almost go with it. To kind of indulge in that sensibility. So you’re moving along in life, and you are, I presume, still skeptical. It sounds like perhaps even a little cynical because you’re able to see, in a sense, this corruption that goes all the way down. And it doesn’t sound like you’re headed towards God at this point. What is it that makes you turn and reconsider this larger question of God?  It was a long journey. Like I had mentioned, I had grown up in the entertainment industry. I had acted as a child and kind of a preteen, stopped for my high school years, and I began again as a young adult, got into the entertainment industry again. That started picking up. Again, I was in my early twenties, and I was kind of living life and enjoying it, now as a full-fledged adult, on my own, trying to piece together a life, as everyone attempts to do when they’re that age, right? And I thought I was cruising along. I thought, “All right. I’ll get there.” And at age 24, I began experiencing these really severe headaches, crippling. The pain was unbearable. It wasn’t just something you pop a pill and you move on. They were migraines, and they were increasing in strength and frequency, and so I had to get it checked out. No doctors really had a good answer for me. I began to lose some strength in my body. At one point, one doctor diagnosed me with spinal meningitis. It was a serious thing, but no one really knew what was going on. And so finally we went to a neurologist and neurosurgeon who finally determined that I had a congenital benign cyst in my brain that had just either grown or shifted enough to where it was disrupting the flow of fluid in my skull, and it had to be removed. So that was not something most 24-year-olds are really expecting to hear when they’re just chugging along in life. And that was a very big turning point in my life, unfortunately, and to my shame, not for the good immediately, but all the things, all the plans, all the ideas I had come up with myself in the previous 24 years were basically brought to a halt, and I had to sit there and undergo brain surgery and have my head shaved and have a row of metallic staples there and look like a monster for several months of my life and be taken care of by my immediate family, who helped nurse me back to health and get me back on my feet. I was left to a pretty dark place. And I’m so thankful for it. I wouldn’t have it any other way now that I can look back. But I had to be there. Like I tell so many people, I’m Italian Argentine. I have a stubborn streak in me. And I just don’t listen. And I know the Lord had to do it this way. Because He needed my attention. He got it, again, not immediately in the way that I would like to tell you here and have a great testimony, to just end it and wrap it up. But I do remember the first moment of real faith in my adult life, and I didn’t know it then. But I remember acknowledging, as I was going into this operating room for the surgery, I had no idea if I was coming out the other end or what would come out the other end. And I remember a silent halfhearted almost but sort of a prayer, like, “Well, I guess You’re in charge.” Something to that effect. I remember it. That is a huge kind of pivot, isn’t it? I mean, when you move from a place where you’re in charge, and then all of a sudden, you have this halfhearted prayer somehow acknowledging someone else or something else is in charge, that you were willing to lift that up to. I would say that’s a pretty big pivot, that you turned that corner. Now, of course that was in a moment. It was a very scary, frightening moment, so I don’t know. After the surgery, did you consider that at all? Or was that something that was just for the moment, and then you left it behind?  It was a messy combination, because it was a messy time in my life. But I remember, for the rest of my life, to this very day, I always think back to that time because it was such a pivotal time for me, and now having the knowledge I have, biblical knowledge, intimacy with God, understanding exactly what the truth is, now I understand that it was a start of acknowledging His existence. Now that’s not enough. That’s not enough. Lots of people believe there is a God, right? Lots of people. And that he’s all sorts of things. But to acknowledge that as a grown man, it was a start of a journey. Unfortunately, when I woke up and I began to see the road ahead of me and how I had lost any hope of the life that I thought I was starting to move towards, I grew angry with God. And I grew angry to the extent of saying, “There’s no way you can exist because why am I in this situation? Why am I suffering? How could you possibly be real if you allow people to undergo this?” Now granted, I look back now… I can say this to you now twenty years on and say, wow. There was a lot of self-pity. There was a lot of crying in my own soup, so to speak. So many people have had it so much worse. I was relatively healthy, you know? But the selfishness of having a life planned, and then the sovereignty of God intervening and saying no. Again, that’s a theological truth, and it wasn’t something I was ready for, because I had heard about a God who’d do anything you ask. You’ve just got to ask for it. Like a genie. He’s running here and there for you, and he’s going to do this, and he’s going to do that. And the thought that God would say no so plainly, so resoundingly to me, made me angry. Yeah. Especially as a young man in your prime. Like you say, 24? That’s when you think you have the world by its tail.  And I like to always say, though, that you can’t be angry at someone who you don’t believe exists. So something had happened in me where I knew it. I knew He was real. I knew He was active. I knew He was present. I knew He was sovereign. And yet I was very, very angry with Him, that He would allow it to go this way. And that’s obviously a major turning point, because, as weird as it sounds to say it, there was faith there. And I know that now. But that period of my life following the surgery was a period where I said, “You know what? We’re all going to die anyway.” then let’s eat, drink, and be merry.” That’s what life is. Live for the flesh. Live for now. There is no tomorrow. There certainly is no eternity. No heaven, no hell. That’s how I began to live the next six or seven years after that, believe it or not. And increasingly worse, waxing worse and worse. I wish I could tell you that I came out going, “Now, I’m going to be a good moral pagan.” I was a better moral pagan on the other side of the surgery, before I ever had that, because at least I had the veneer, right? Of, “Well, I’m trying to be decent.” That was no longer there. Okay. Yeah. So then after the surgery… It’s interesting you had this moment, this seed of faith, this tacit belief in God, and then it just went like Katy bar the door. You just let it go, and you just decided to live for yourself basically, it sounds like.  Yeah. And so I’m thankful for, my then girlfriend, now my wife, who was with me the whole time and loved on me like no human being’s ever loved on me. And we got married. Did she have any belief in God at all? Or was she an atheist as well?  You know, she came from a more, an Orthodox background. She’s Middle Eastern, so her family grew up in the Orthodox church, so again, there’s a veneer there of religiosity, right? “Well, we believe these things are true, even if there’s no necessarily personal relationship. There’s an objective acknowledgment that we think these things are true, and etc.” But she would tell you now that she wasn’t necessarily living those truths out. But she was good to you, it sounds like, and she was with you through all this period of time.  Yeah, she was. Before we got engaged, right around the time we got engaged, her brother, my brother-in-law, around that time became a radical born-again Christian. Her brother?  Her brother, yeah. My soon-to-be brother-in-law. And he was constantly in my face, preaching the gospel, telling me verbatim, “You need to repent, or you’re going to hell,” and I’m so appreciative of that now, but at the time, boy! There wasn’t much more you could say to me that could get me riled up than preaching the gospel. And we just butted heads. And so one day… We were newlyweds. My wife and I had been married less than a year, and she’d been gone all day or a couple of days, and she came home and said, “You need to believe in Jesus, or you’re going to go to hell.” And that was the first time she ever said anything like that to me. She had a glow about her. Everything was different, and that really just terrified me. Because I’m like, “Look, I love you. I know we’ve only been married a few months, but if you want this marriage to continue, don’t bring this up again.” And that wasn’t a very comfortable situation, obviously. We weren’t sure how this was going to work out. She took a more passive approach. She still went to church and worshiped and did those things, but she didn’t bring it up to me, kind of left me out of it. And I went on my own and would be like, “Okay, so now my wife’s gone crazy, and I need to figure out how to prove to her this is all fantasy. The best way for me to do that is to, instead of parroting what other people say, is to actually read the Bible. And that way I can explain to her, ‘Well, this is why this is false,’ and, ‘This contradicts that,’” and so I began to actually read the word of God. So what did you think of the Bible before you started reading it? And then, of course, I’d love to know what you thought when you started reading it.  Just another great religious book, like all the rest, right? There’s a lot of religious books out there. Spiritual, religious. I think, to the atheist, they’re synonyms for each other, and what I’ve always explained to atheists is that actually there’s really no spiritual truth in any of those things because there’s only one Spirit, and He wrote only one book, and when you start to frame it in that dichotomy. You can say, “Oh, well, these things have nice teachings,” and that’s fine and dandy, but at the end of the day, there’s no redemption. There’s no eternal value there. Because they’re just nice words that you can read and enjoy and put on a shelf. Whereas, the only book written by the Spirit of God, the word of God, actually tells you how you can know Him and then how you can spend eternity with Him. And it gives you instructions on how to do that. And it introduces you to the Person who can grant you that. So that’s how I’ve always seen the distinction now. Before, it was all just big books with nice words and good teachings, and Jesus was just another guy, like Mohammad and Moses and whomever else. I had never heard that Jesus was God the Son. I had only heard Son of God. That didn’t mean anything to me. It meant a diminutive. It meant that He was here on behalf of God, but His name is Emmanuel, because He’s God with us, and I didn’t know those things. And again, I don’t blame anyone for that, but I also look around in my childhood and go, “Where were the Christians telling me that?” There were so many Christians telling me I should do this or I need to believe that, but no one was telling me that God became a man and took on the sins of the world, including mine, to accomplish what I could never accomplish, to do it on my behalf. And I never got any of that. And I think that’s where we fall short a lot, is making sure we clarify our definitions. So language is everything, so oftentimes we as Christians, we fail to grasp that, to communicate that to atheists or agnostics or whomever it may be. So, Ian, it sounds like that, when you started reading the Bible, for the first time really, you read it in order to disprove it, to take down your wife’s faith. So what did you find when you started reading the Bible for yourself?  Jesus. And I don’t mean to give you a pat answer. Those words… I had the version where His words are in red, and I’m telling you… I think I started in Matthew. I’m pretty sure I did. And His words were in red, and every time I went through those words that were in red. It was unlike any other experience I had had reading any other book in my entire life. It was the hearing without the verbal, oral, physical experience of hearing. It was like an awakening at the same time. It was like an alarm clock that I was reading. I don’t know. I’m trying to articulate something that really, for me, has no physical kind of boundaries in which to put it in and articulate. I just… I met Him there. You met the Person of Jesus, not just a character or a figure in a story or on the page. It was someone who was actually real, it sounds like, that you encountered.  You know, it’s like. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this movie. It was a big movie in the 1980s called The Neverending Story, and the boy reads this book, and the book starts talking to him. And he’s like, “What?” And the Person of Jesus began speaking to me. I’m like, “Who’s this written for? This ancient book, written on another continent. How is this talking to me right now?” And that began the final… If the flight started, brain surgery is taking off, we were in our final descent here, really coming into the gospels and going, “Okay, something’s happening. Something’s happening.” Yeah. So when your grandfather planted that seed when you were 9 years old, asking you if you knew the Person of Jesus, and then here you are in your mid twenties, I guess, mid to late twenties, and then you’re, for the first time encountering this person. It sounds like it’s something so much more real than you ever thought possible, that this person was very real and true. Now, throughout, you’ve talked a little bit about not understanding who He was prior to reading, that He was God who came as a man. You’ve also talked about the gospel, and I wonder if… Was it through reading the Bible that you understood not only Who the Person of Jesus was but also why He came?  Yeah. And that’s really kind of the crux of all this, right? I guess the person of Jesus is Who I met reading the scriptures. That was when He became real, and that was really the first encounter of another spiritual truth, right? Which is knowing someone who is not physically present in the room. So when I read His words, I heard His voice. He talks about it in John chapter 10, right? “My sheep hear My voice.” Boy did I hear it! I heard it, and it freaked me out. Because I never expected that. I didn’t know what to expect, frankly, other than just to read it and say, “This is why it’s fake,” and then move on to the next thing. And then everything just came to a crashing halt, and I found myself wandering into Catholic churches because they were the closest and looking around and going… It was empty. Middle of the week. No one there. Saying, “I guess I’ll sit here and fold my hands and pray.” I didn’t know what I was doing. I did that randomly, not sure what I was doing there. Were you asking your wife about any of this as you were experiencing this encounter with Christ?  No. I was hiding it from her because I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want her to think that I was a Christian. I didn’t want her to get any crazy ideas. I just wanted to read this book and then tell her why she’s wrong and call it a day. But no. I hid it from her as best I could. So you were reading the Bible, and you were still… It sounds like a real approach avoidance kind of thing, that you were being drawn in but yet pushing back. I imagine that you continued some kind of pursuit on your own? Walk us through the next step.  So we have that going on. We have my brother-in-law continuing to come at me. Very outspoken, bold Christian, constantly using apologetics to kind of come at my worldviews. I had all these… I thought they were lofty ideas, right? And we would get into debates about all sorts of stuff, and he started to make sense, and I was like, “That’s weird.” Because I used to think all Christians were just crazy and they had just kind of given up and decided to believe this crazy thing. And here was this guy speaking truth to me and having it resonate with me as truth, like, “Wow! That makes sense. There’s something here.” That threw me off combined with the stuff that was already going on that we spoke about. And one day, it culminated. When I was home alone and I was, again, reading the scriptures, and I was just overwhelmed, I guess, with the presence of God and I guess what I know now to be really conviction of sin. Me personally, not as a theological construct. Not as an ideological abstract. But as something that I was guilty of, that I had done against a perfect and holy God. And I got on my knees, and I’ve never done anything like this before, and I said, “I’m sorry.” I don’t think I had my eyes closed. I had my head kind of bowed a little bit. And I remember saying, “I’m sorry,” out loud, and there’s no one home. It wasn’t just spoken carelessly. It was spoken deliberately. I knew Who I was saying it to. I knew why I was saying it. And my heart flooded. My mind flooded. I was overwhelmed with all sorts of… I don’t even know what thoughts and sensations, and it felt like something really important had happened. I did realize, looking back, that’s what Jesus talked to Nicodemus about, saying you must be born again if you want to see the kingdom of God. And I knew that’s what God did that day. That is the day that God gave me a new heart, gave me His Spirit, and started me on this new life. And I was never the same after that. Wow. It sounds like quite a journey, Ian. There was a lot that built up to this moment of you getting down on your knees and surrendering to the person that you not only thought was real but also true, and the one who was actually there, as Schaeffer says, the God Who is there. I’m impressed, also I think that you are, as someone who is thoughtful about ideas, that you were a skeptic by nature. You’ve had this sensed personal encountering with God, but yet you had your brother-in-law challenging you intellectually with ideas from the Christian worldview that made it sound substantive and true, especially as compared to what you believed. So it’s not just an experience, is what I hear you saying, but it’s also that you can make sense of reality through the lens of the Christian worldview, that it makes sense that the Bible makes sense, that brokenness that you saw in everyone and everything that you referred to a bit ago, that that make sense through a Christian or a biblical lens, that there are things that are broken, that the world is broken and corrupt, that we ourselves are broken and corrupt, but it sounds like you found the remedy for that when you felt guilt because we are all guilty, and you came before the One who was the only One who could remedy that guilt in you and save you. It sounds like everything spiritually, experientially, intellectually, everything kind of all came together, it sounds like, to that point, and then you were transformed.  That’s a really good summary of it. I think the framework behind that is the realization that Jesus is not a theological construct, but He’s the Lord Jesus. He’s the Person of God. He is not simply an idea that you borrow from and then you mix with all this other stuff over here, but he’s someone you meet, and when you meet God, and it actually is God, the only natural response is to fall to your knees and worship. I didn’t choose to do that. I didn’t plan on doing that. That wasn’t what I started the day thinking about doing, but however he does it in the spiritual realm, it happened, and all of a sudden, that experiential knowledge, combined with the biblical knowledge I had begun to acquire by reading His word, even a very, really just still in its early stages, right? I didn’t have a great grasp on theology or anything, but just very rudimentary understanding of who Jesus is, right? From the Bible. And everything coalesced and became one thing. And that’s really what I feel like I would make a point of is, especially as far as atheists are concerned, is that you no longer have these realms in which you filter all your thoughts and ideas through, which is how I lived my life. I went through this political realm, through kind of this biological realm, and then it becomes one stream, and it’s not just theological, it’s also experiential, but one can’t exist apart from the other. It’s married together. And it was like, “Boom!”  This great big blast went off, and the tunnel opened, and of course I didn’t see any of those things. I’m speaking strictly from an intellectual view. It all just came together, and everything finally made sense. Every question I had had as a 12-year-old boy was at least hinted at or immediately answered by understanding that Jesus is God, He is not only real but intimately involved with His creation, and that He’s stooped, humbled Himself into His creation in a way to reconcile those who rebelled against him back to himself, and to know him and to fellowship with him. And having that all come together, all the other questions I had about, “Why this?” “Why that?” they either were answered by a biblical truth or they didn’t feel as important anymore. Because obviously, if the truth of God is kind of settled onto your life, everything else kind of gets pushed to the sidelines, right? All of a sudden, you’re going, “Oh, wow! I’ve got to navigate this now. This is now the primary focus of my attention and my heart. Yeah, it’s a huge paradigm shift, the way that you see and experience life. What becomes important and what becomes less important. It sounds like you really did undergo just a full life transformation once you found the person of Christ, and it sounds like just surrendered to Him. It’s a beautiful story, Ian, and I am thinking about these atheists who you’ve spoken to already a little bit or even skeptics, how it’s so easy, I think to compartmentalize and try to think about, okay, making sense intellectually of this and experientially of that, but they can’t coalesce in a way that you have found, and they’re still searching to try to make sense of all of reality, perhaps. Or maybe not. Maybe they’re just perfectly fine in the way that they’re seeing and experiencing life and their own worldview. For those who are listening, those skeptics who may be listening to your story. Do you have any advice for them if they are willing to take the next step or maybe even look at the Bible or anything to find the Person of Jesus like you have? Or to test it? Or anything?  Before I knew the Lord, I would really come up with these great intellectual arguments. I’d try to be as articulate as I could about why this can’t be true, and I learned about ontological arguments, right? And the cosmological. And then I began to hear all about apologetics, and I began to have answers to all those things. But none of those things matter until you individually, A, decide you want to know what’s real. You want to know the truth. You’re willing to accept whatever it is. You’re willing to accept the truth. I was at that point before I ever was saved. I had started reading everything I could get my hands on because I was ready to… I even, and I don’t boast about this, I just simply added because I wanted to read it from an ideological standpoint, what did it say? I had a copy of The Satanic Bible in my library. Not because I was a Satanist. But I want to know what these Satanists believe. Why did they really think this was true? Crazy enough is I had gotten to a point where I was like, “You know what? If something has enough truth, I’m willing to go all the way with it and believe it. And I think some of these skeptics today, they’re hardened. They’re hardened because they see a hard world around them, a difficult life, a life that seems, in many ways, senseless, and I get that. Believe me, I get it. And we as believers have to be ready to engage them there, right there. We have to be able to talk about the seemingly meaninglessness of it all. Because let’s be honest, even Christians experience that. … The Apostle Paul talks about the imagination, right? High and lofty things that are brought down by the truths of God. I think a lot of skeptics hold onto those, but at the end of the day, the foundation for many of them, there’s an anger and a hurt. There’s a pain there and a world that’s very painful, that’s very difficult to navigate, and we’ve got to be able, I think, as Christians to engage them on both levels. Because they know it’s true. They know sin is real. They may not call it that. But they know the world is broken. They see it all around them in every system of life, in every facet they’ve lived, the classroom, the boardroom, the home. It’s broken. Something is terribly wrong with the human race, with humanity, and Christians have the answer. It’s the truth. We just often… I think we gloss over it instead of really engaging them right where they’re at. Yeah, that’s a good word for both the skeptic and the Christian. Is there anything else, as we’re wrapping up here, Ian, that you want to add? Anything you think we’ve missed? I am curious, at the very end, too, to know what you’ve been involved with since you’ve been a Christian. Any kind of ministry? It sounds like you’re very passionate about making sure that people understand and know what is true and real, especially about Jesus.  After I got saved, I got plugged into a pretty good, sound, Bible-believing church. We were going there not only every Sunday but sometimes two, maybe even three times a week. I began serving, along with my wife, in children’s ministry, first as a Sunday school teacher, then kind of like a coordinator/overseer of the ministry. I began to lead Bible studies at the jails in Los Angeles County. I got to do Bible studies and worship for inmates, and that was an enormously rich and rewarding experience. I got to take part in an overseas mission trip which was, again, something that… You learn so much. I think that really—and I used to say this all the time when we’re serving. You can believe all the things you say you believe, and that’s great, and that’s fine, but it really… where the rubber meets the road is where you start to put that into practice, when you start to do it when you don’t feel like doing it, and for people who may not be the easiest people to love. That’s where the Lord gets in there, in those dirty nooks and crannies, and does some really unexpected things, and those have been the most rewarding moments. Where I used to think things were mundane, sweeping the floors or wiping down things or cleaning up after other people, picking up stuff, doing that in the Lord is a totally different thing. And again, without Him there, it would just feel like chores or errands, but when you start to put your body in the way, and say, “God, use me in ministry somehow,” He’ll honor that, for sure. So I spent the last ten years or so, a little over a decade, as my kids were born and starting to grow older doing that, and now I’m venturing into kind of a new arena, starting a new project. I started a media company. It’s a fledgling media company called Infinite Burn Media, and I’m really starting to navigate what that looks like, producing all sorts of content, video content, books, podcasting, etc., and so I’m starting that out, and I’m seeing what the Lord has for me there, but I’m excited just to speak candidly and transparently, like I am with you, about where I’ve been, who I’ve been, and Who I met, and how that changed everything. It sounds like it has changed everything. Thank you so much, Ian, for coming on and being transparent, being forthcoming, and again, so passionate about what you believe and why you believe it, and who you believe in. Thank you so much for coming onto this podcast with me today.  Thank you so much, Jana. I really appreciate it. You’re so welcome. 

Psychology professor Dr. Rich Suplita believed science provided the best explanation for truth, and he promoted atheism on the university campus.  Over time, he began to question his own beliefs, and it led him to find truth in Christ and become an advocate for the Christian worldview. askaformeratheist.com ratiochristi.org/chapter/university-of-georgia/ To hear more stories about former 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. You can also hear today’s story and see other video testimonies on our Side B Stories website you can find at www.sidebstories.com. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who became a Christian against all odds. Each story is different. Each journey courses a different path. Everyone has their reasons for belief and for disbelief. There are the reasons that sound good and reasonable as supporting our beliefs, and then there are the real reasons underneath the surface, sometimes presumed and unexplored, sometimes not particularly rational.  One of the most interesting findings in my research with former atheists was the difference between the reasons they gave for atheism, which they said were mostly based upon reason, science, and evidence, and in hindsight, the real reasons they said why they rejected God and belief in Christianity. It turns out, on self reflection, that one-fourth of them actually rejected God solely for more personal, rather than intellectual or rational reasons. For the remaining three-quarters, it was a mixture of both the personal and the intellectual. As humans, we are holistic beings. We are all susceptible to rationalizing what we want to be true. Of course, our desires and objective truth may line up, but sometimes it’s good to be skeptical of our own beliefs, to look more deeply at why we believe what we believe.  In our story today, Rich was compelled to examine his own beliefs, first as a Christian, and he found his beliefs wanting. Then, as a militant atheist, he became skeptical of his own skepticism. As an academic and deeply introspective and contemplative thinker, he became willing to look at his intellectual reasons for atheism but also beneath the surface to the real reasons below. I hope you’ll come along to hear what he found along his journey from belief to disbelief and then back to a much stronger belief in God and Christianity than he once knew.  Welcome to Side B Stories, Rich. It’s so great to have you with me today.  Yeah. Good morning. Thank you. So the listeners know a little bit about you. Can you tell us a bit about who you are, where you live, your education perhaps?  Sure, yeah. My name is Dr. Rich Suplita. My wife, Mary Kathryn, and I, we live in Athens, Georgia, and we do a lot of ministry at the University of Georgia, with Georgia students. My educational background: I did my underground at West Virginia University, which is my home state, and then came to the University of Georgia in 2000. From 2000 to 2005, I was a PhD student, earned my masters and then my PhD in psychology, with an emphasis on neuroscience and psychopharmacology, and I went on to teach as a lecturer at the University of Georgia for about 10 years after that. Wow. Okay. So you’re an academic by training and history, but it sounds like you’ve moved in a completely different direction from that, and I can’t wait to hear all about it. Now, let’s get into your story from childhood. I know that part of your story is that you were a militant atheist, but you didn’t start that way. Why don’t you bring us into your world as a child? Talk to us about your family, your community, friends, culture. Was God in any of that at all?  Yeah, sure, absolutely. He was. Very much so. I was raised in a middle class, blue collar family in north central West Virginia, a little town there called Fairmont, West Virginia, and my family and I, we were members of a Church of Christ. And so it was a three-times-a-week thing. We were very much in the habit of going to church. I learned a lot of Bible growing up, Bible verses, Sunday school, all of that, so God was very much in the picture, although it never really resonated with me on a deeply personal level. So you went through the routine, and I guess the ritual of going to church three times a week, but it never took personally for you. Through that period of time, would you ever say that there was even an intellectual assent to belief in God? Was it something that you had accepted on that level, although you didn’t accept it personally, perhaps?  Oh, yes. Absolutely. I did believe that it was true, and there was good and bad there. It wasn’t all a negative thing. There were certainly positives. I believed it factually, and I would say, and part of this was a product of the time. In American evangelicalism at the time, there was a big emphasis on fire and brimstone, eternal judgment, and of course, that is a true part of the Bible that needs to be put into perspective, but as a child, I really remember thinking of God as a God who was displeased with me, who didn’t like me, who almost was a God that I was terrified to really approach, and I really think I just had no understanding of grace growing up, and for that reason, it was easy for it to not make its way into my heart. I went through the protocol that I learned about, “What must a person do to become a Christian?” because I did believe it intellectually. I did believe that it was factually true. I hadn’t even considered that it might not be, and so I wanted to be on the right side of eternity. And so I went through the protocol that my particular denomination offered, and I do remember feeling a certain peace when that happened, but there was no life change. I really went back to being the same kid, the same teenager that I always had been, and there was no real desire in my heart to pursue Christ for truth’s sake, pursue Christ for the sake of Christ being the son of God and true and worthy of my worship. So you lived with this, I guess, rather tentative belief. Belief in the sense that it wasn’t taken personally or with life change. How long did you express belief in God, and when did doubts or resistance or rejection of that start to come?  Yeah. So I retained my belief in God and even, I would say, religious practice, going to church, maybe not three times a week, but on a very regular basis, throughout my undergraduate years at West Virginia University. I do think it was some time during that time frame, especially towards the end, maybe the last year, if I’m remembering correctly, that I started, for the first time, really questioning the possibility of, “Well, maybe Christianity is wrong. Maybe there’s some truth here,” but beliefs like, “The Bible is the perfect word of God.” I started to question that. Like many college students do, I really came to question the creation narrative. “Did God create like Genesis 1 and 2 says He did? Or is that just a metaphor for evolutionary processes over billions of years?” And so I was really wrestling with those questions at the time, but I would say that the deep skepticism didn’t set in then. That was something that came more during my graduate school years. Okay. Because I would imagine, pursuing psychology at the university level, a lot of the coursework is through the framework of a naturalistic or materialistic kind of thinking. Was that influential in your pushing back against these kind of narratives that you were finding a bit unbelievable?  Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what I really remember. And there are only certain snapshots that, when I look back, stick out in my mind, and of course, you have a whole life that’s being lived there. With anybody’s story. Regardless of whatever direction they’re moving toward or away from, there are a lot of complicating factors. What I remember in terms of the classroom and academia, what I was learning during my graduate school years, there was specifically a History of Psychology class, a seminar for graduate students. We had 15, maybe 20 students in there. I’m one of the students. And I loved this professor. He was a semi-retired professor emeritus, and I just loved his personality. Great guy. I connected with him. He had a very warm heart, was very approachable, but he was, from what I could discern, adamantly a disbeliever in anything supernatural. And that’s where the enemy—I want to be clear this man is not my enemy. We have an enemy of our souls, Satan. But I think that’s where the enemy does his best work, is through people that come into our lives that are very disarming, that we have their words, their beliefs, their philosophies that are certainly counter to the Bible, and so I remember a big part of the class was really instilling this metaphysical position of naturalism, of physicalism, the idea that, when it comes to understanding the brain, the human mind, that is the subject matter of psychology, that really understanding it as a machine is the proper way to view it, that it is a mechanical thing, mechanical problems lead to psychological problems, damage to the brain causes these different types of dysfunction, and consequently, a corollary of that would be that the mind is what the brain does, nothing more and nothing less. So did that then cause you to question your own spiritual nature?  Yeah, I think it did. I was still involved with Christianity, but it was becoming more and more in a marginalized sense. But I was previously married. My wife Mary Kathryn was previously married. My now ex-wife and I, we were members of a church when we moved from Savannah up to this area of Georgia, so there was still a connection to Christianity, but I increasingly disbelieved it, I would say. It became something that… What was really resonating to me was science. “I’m a neuroscience student. I do scientific research. This book is outmoded. It’s outdated. Hey, maybe there are some good things in there. Religion’s not all bad. It can give a person a sense of culture and kind of the background, a way to connect with family and certain friends,” but in terms of it being objectively true, I had pretty much checked out at that point. So, this religion that you had intellectually believed, you found very strong intellectual reasons to leave it behind.  Right. In terms of my personal conviction… At that point, the question did God exist, I probably would say, “I don’t know.” I would have probably said, “Probably not. There’s probably not a personal God Who is described in these books that we call the Bible. That’s probably much more myth and legend, embellishing different nationalistic stories in the Old Testament, a lot of wishful thinking in the New Testament, among desperate people, and that’s… I didn’t think about it a lot, but I think that would characterize pretty much where I was at the time. Yeah. So you left it behind. I guess for many years of your life you had believed it, but I guess in your twenty-something, as you became educated, you became, I guess in a way, too smart to believe that kind of superstition.  Yeah. You mentioned or inferred, I guess, that Christians essentially were uneducated, perhaps a little bit ignorant, and they believed that a book that just doesn’t hold up to what an educated person would actually believe. So as you’re moving forward, what are you finding? Do you move into atheism by default? Or does it become more of an intentional decision and identity?  Yeah. I think there was actually both of those. I think there were two phases there. I think that kind of what I have been describing up until this point was more by default, more passive. You know, you’re in graduate school, and I remember I still went to a Bible study the first year or two that I was on campus at UGA as a grad student, and you become sort of like a family with your lab partners. Your major professor, the fellow graduate students. You just do life with these people. You do classes, seminars, go to conferences together. They really become like your siblings, and they jokingly got me a little action figure Jesus for a birthday present one year, and I thought it was hilarious, because I wasn’t an evangelical Christian by then. I just was still going to Bible study, but I was… The first couple of years there, it was funny for them to playfully, gently mock, shall we say, my residual beliefs. But as I said, during that trek through grad school, I became more and more influenced by these folks. Their worldview. Their politics. Their devotion to science. That was such a strong association, and we know that the word science can be used in many different senses, right? But the idea that I’m a scientist. You know, “Science says X.” This topic of the Bible or Jesus or the apostles, that’s religion, and that’s a far inferior way of knowing and experiencing reality than the scientific method is. And so that was the passive part of it. The more deliberative stage really came, I think, in the aftermath of being on the receiving end of divorce documents, and I think, in retrospect, a lot of that had to do with emotional pain that I didn’t understand at the time as pain, but it was, I think, reflexive and sort of catapulted me more into what we might call militant atheism. It’s interesting that you revealed that, that there was some kind of emotional pain that catapulted you into a more militant atheism. I’m trying to hear and possibly infer the connection there. Why emotional pain would push you towards a more militant atheism. Why do you suppose that was?  Yeah. And I want to preface my statement with I’m just talking about myself. Right.  I want to be clear. I’m not trying to insinuate that all atheists are angry people who are mad at God. I can’t speak for them. They have their own stories, and when they tell me, I listen to them, and I believe what they say. For me personally, in my own situation, I really do think it was a disappointment with God more than a disbelief in God. Because again I had sort of jettisoned the Bible, but the idea that there was something higher, a higher power. I would go back and forth. The psychologist in me would say, “Well, that’s just a residual thing from your childhood, going to church,” but there was something that seemed to go beyond that. But I was disappointed in this God for my own failures, for the failures of my marriage, my family, the fact that I was not going to be a daily presence in the life of my three daughters anymore. And that was the big one. That was the big one, more than, I think grieving the actual dissolution of the marriage, it was, “We’re not going to be an intact family anymore,” and there was a sense… I don’t know if I really thought of it in my mind at the time this way. I don’t think I would’ve put it into these words, but there was really a sense in which God or the universe or whatever you want to call it, my higher power had failed me or let me down. So, yes, I can see then where disbelief would be both intellectual and personal or emotional in that sense, that there were a lot of reasons to push away from this God who you once believed as a child. So how long were you in this particular phase of your life? And what did that looking like, walking as a militant atheist?  Somewhere around the year 2002 and 2003, I checked out, and then my return to Christianity, at least in terms of believing it to be factually true, and maybe we can get into this more later, was late in 2011, and so I’m going to say roughly an eight-year period of time that I would’ve said… And at the time, I would’ve never thought that there was any possibility of me ever calling myself a Christian again, like, “That was my past, that was my childhood, those were my formative years, I left that behind,” and the idea that I would ever go back there would’ve almost been laughable to me at the time. Did you move into a strongly atheistic community that was reinforcing and supporting your ideas?  Yeah. I think so. I do remember coming across The God Delusion, which was probably the most popular of what are called the New Atheist books, of course that one by Richard Dawkins. I would say that was really my entrance point to a more militant variety of atheism. Like, “I’m not just a skeptic now. I’m actually going to wear, to own, to appropriate this title atheist, and I’m not going to be ashamed of that.” So of course I read Dawkins, and that sort of introduced me to the other New Atheists, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, and I would say probably what ended up being the most influential of all to me actually was the podcast, the internet show out of Austin, Texas, with Matt Dillahunty, Atheist Experience, spending many, many hours, sometimes until two in the morning, watching back episodes of that. So you were really looking towards becoming very saturated, I guess you could say, in the rhetoric and the language and the thinking, really, of the atheist community. So you walked in that for, it looks like a period of eight or nine years. What started changing your view? If you were so ingrained in that kind of thinking. What happened then?  Again, you know, it’s challenging to try to really pinpoint specific things, but I’ve done that, and again, I don’t think it was one thing, but I really believed that there was sort of, at the same time, an intellectual problem that I was developing with metaphysical naturalism, physicalism, materialism. It goes by different terms. This idea or doctrine that all that exists is matter, all that occurs is matter in motion. There’s a universe filled with stuff, natural stuff, obeying natural laws, but there’s nothing beyond that. As a neuroscientist, I developed an intellectual problem, and it really focused on the idea, more than anything else, of free will, of choice or volition. I have never found a way to… And this is something that philosophers have discussed at length, but I’ve never been able to reconcile metaphysical naturalism, physicalism, with the idea that there’s some type of capacity in human beings for genuine meaningful choice or volition. And so I really was confused by that problem, and I knew… I saw it as being a problem for my own beliefs, my own worldview at the time, and I think, mapped onto that roughly at the same time was just the experience of being a father to three daughters. That was huge. I think I had gotten myself to the point, for myself, where I became kind of satisfied that, “Okay, I’m here on this planet for who knows how long? 50, 60, 80, maybe 100 years, and then I’m just going to die one day, and that’s going to be it. Lights out. Fade to black. And it won’t matter because there won’t be a me to be aware that I had ever existed.” One of the things that I would say as an atheist was, when people would bring up this idea of the existential problem, I would say, “Well, does it bother you that you were not alive 100 years ago? Does it bother you that were not alive 200 years ago?” And of course, people will say, “No, because I wasn’t alive yet.” And I’d say, “Exactly, so once you and I are dead, we’re not going to care that we’re dead. We just won’t exist anymore.” So I think I got in a position where I was satisfied with that for myself, but I could never get to the same level of satisfaction with that being true for the lives of my three daughters. I can see where the existential problem could be dismissed pre and post death, but as you said, when you start looking at the implications of your own worldview and see if they’re actually livable, like trying to say that free choice is an illusion. I presume that you had some differences, then, with Sam Harris and the way that he perceives free well. Or as a neuroscientist, the whole concept of consciousness and where that comes from. So there’s the mental life. But there’s also, again more existentially, meaning and purpose, human dignity, values, those things. From an existential individual perspective, did any of those things also bother you?  Yeah. I think it did. Especially centered around the idea of justice and human rights. And it’s not something I went as deep in to the time. Now, I think today this has become sort of like the backbone of my main apologetic when I interact with skeptics. But yeah, there was the idea… I remember thinking, at least a bit, about ethical systems, and what is the justification for human worth and dignity and value on metaphysical naturalism, which was the basis for my atheism at the time. I could not get myself past a utilitarian view of that. People are essentially worth… their value, their dignity is tantamount to their value to society, their perceived value or their real value to society, but of course, where does that leave someone who is severely physically disabled or mentally disabled or something like that? Is this a lesser person? And I would think that a person who is going to be consistent with a truly metaphysical position would have to say that that’s true, although there’s something in us that recoils against that notion. You know, it strikes me as almost ironic that the more that you ventured into atheism, listening to Matt Dillahunty and reading books, that it actually surfaced some issues or some cognitive dissonance in you. The logical endpoint of atheism, in many different ways, is a little bit difficult to take, in terms of when you’re thinking about reality and how just intellectually and experientially things match with reality, somehow that it actually surfaced some areas of tension or cognitive dissonance for you that allowed you to become a little bit more skeptical of your own skepticism.  Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what I started experiencing. And so I really… How would I phrase this? I checked out on atheism, in terms of its militant variety, in terms of it’s Richard Dawkins esque, Matt Dillahunty esque… For a while there, I really wanted to get something like the Atheist Experience started in Athens, and I thought it was great what they were doing there. I think they called themselves the Atheist Community of Austin, Texas, and I’m like, “Wow, it’d be great if we had something like that here in Athens.” Long about this time, which would’ve been 2010, going into 2011, I’m like, “Okay, this is not my future. I’m not that convinced of these things.” In fact I retreated to a more moderate position. I still would’ve never thought that I would ever, in a million years, become a Bible-believing Christian again, but I wanted to retreat away from the militant atheism, more to an agnosticism, a weak agnosticism, an agnosticism that really appreciated ideas like the idea in NA, Narcotics Anonymous, of a higher power. You know, my higher power. A guide. Some type of spiritual guide that helps me get through life and relate to people and those sorts of things, and so I knew that… I had served at this point, the previous two years, as the faculty advisor for UGA Atheists, a student organization of skeptical students on campus. It had been the Secular Student Association, and eventually, it went back to being the Secular Student Association, but during the years I was involved, it was called UGA Atheists. So I knew that, going into the following year, I was going to say, “No. Hey, ya’ll, I’ve had a good time. This has been fun getting to know you, but I’m too busy. I’m not going to do that again next year.”   I came across the… the guys with The Great Exchange outreach. So what happened there? Who are the guys with The Great Exchange outreach?  Okay, so yeah, The Great Exchange is an outreach or an evangelistic survey. Which is really just a nine-question survey, so you just ask people walking by, “Hey, do you have a few minutes to take a spiritual interest survey?” And roughly half the people, depending on where you are, will say yes. And so it asks questions like, “Describe your spiritual background. What was that like?” “Do you believe in God?” “What do you think God is like?” “What do you see as the greatest problem in the world today?” “Is there a solution to that problem?” And really it’s kind of a funnel. But the real kicker question is, “If you were to stand before God, and God were to ask you why should I let you into heaven, what would you say?” Well, I skipped a couple of questions. One of the questions is, “Who, in your opinion, is Jesus Christ?” And so you just write down, in a few words, what the person says. The last item is, “If you could know God personally, would you like to?” And if the person says yes, then the idea is you ask, “Do you have about three to five minutes? I would like to tell you what the Bible says, what scripture says about how you can know God personally.” So it was the first ever Great Exchange event. It was on Good Friday of 2011, which was an extraordinarily late Good Friday that year. I remember. At the very end of the semester. And I was approached as I was walking across the Tate Plaza at UGA, and so what I did is I gave all of the atheistic answers to the questionnaire. And mind you, I had checked out on atheism at this point. The true response for a lot of those questions would be, “I just don’t know. For the past several years, I’ve been calling myself an atheist. I really went kind of extreme with that. That’s not where I am now, but I really don’t know who Jesus is. I’m open to the possibilities.” And so this was the Holy Spirit at work arranging this particular time and circumstance for me to meet some guys, specifically Pastor David Holt. He wanted to know kind of like what we’ve been talking about here. What got me into skepticism, what got me into atheism, where I truly was now, and specifically what did I make of Jesus, what did I make of the claims of Jesus of Nazareth. So we started meeting once a week, on Fridays I believe it was, in downtown Athens at a coffee shop, just to talk about those things. Well, yeah, that’s interesting that he started by asking you questions. And trying to really get a sense of who you are, what you were thinking, rather than just pounding you with information or what you should believe, that he was actually willing to take the time with you to really explore what your thinking was.  Right. So where did it go from there? Did you start studying certain things? How did Dr. Holt lead you?  Yeah, eventually I did. That was after a few meetings. The first, we talked for about an hour that day, at The Great Exchange, and I believe I gave him my email. I know I received an email from him within a few days, maybe that same night. I don’t remember. “Hey. Great meeting you today. I think your story, what you’ve described is fascinating,” and he asked me, “Why do you disbelieve in God?” or, “What are your intellectual problems with the God of the Bible?” Just a very open-ended thing, and I think he was looking for a more succinct response than what I returned to him, but I probably sent him back about 10 or 12 paragraphs worth of information. And of course I didn’t know David. We’re very close now, but I got a response—anybody who knows David, this will resonate with. It’s like, “Okay, thanks.” I’m like, “Really? That’s it?” But then he followed it up very quickly with, “Can you meet?” “Are you open to getting together, getting coffee, because I really want to talk to you one on one?” And you can explain maybe more specifically where you’ve been, what journey you’ve been on,” so we started doing that. Yeah. I’m, I guess, a little bit surprised that you were so willing to meet with a pastor, but it shows that you did have a willingness or an openness to actually explore, at that point. And I think that’s huge.  Yeah. And he’s just a very… He’s very gifted. He has an amazing ability to connect with people and to hear them, to, I think validate them without compromising what he believes, and just really… And people are eager for that. People are so eager. I’ve heard it referred to as evangelism with our ears, right? Which I’m terrible at, by the way. There’s a lot of room for growth with me, but I’m aware of that, and I try to do better, but asking people the questions and really letting them… It doesn’t matter who we’re talking to, whether it’s an atheistic or an agnostic or a Muslim or a Buddhist, we don’t want to go in and tell them what they believe, right? We want to ask questions and let them tell us, and of course, naturally, that’s going to build rapport and open up doors. So, as you were having a conversation, and he was asking you questions, was he trying to rebut your points? Or was he just continuing to ask questions? And then where did that lead?  Yeah, that’s a good point. Unlike me, probably, my tendency, he did not jump on the opportunity to say, “No, you’re wrong about that, and let me give you seven reasons that shows that my position is correct.” Rather, he just really asked the questions and good follow-up questions. I remember, at some point, I think maybe it was the second or third meeting we had, where we’d talked about so many things, and he says, “Well, what would you say right now, at this point, where we’ve been, this journey you’ve been on, one or two of the big issue things that you see that really keep you away from placing your faith in Christ.” And I think that’s a great question, when you’re at that point with a skeptic, and so I thought about it for a minute, and I said, “Okay, well, there are really two that pop into my mind. Number one is evolution.” Okay, this is not where I am now, but I said, “I’m a scientist. That’s what I do. That’s my background. That’s my education. I teach. One of the things I teach here at UGA is a seminar on evolutionary psychology, and this is settled science, and there’s just really no way that I think I can reconcile that with what it says in the book of Genesis.” Okay, again, my tendency would be to start giving people disproofs. And I’m not saying there’s never a role for that. There can be a role for that, but that’s not what David did. He said, “Okay. What’s the other one?” Rather than objecting, just, “Okay.” He’s still in listening mode. And what a great example. And I said, “Okay, the other one of all the things that could be considered is the doctrine of hell, of eternal punishment, and I don’t understand how it can be just or fair that people would spend eternity in hell, which is infinite punishment, for finite sin,” and again, he didn’t these rebutting. I know he knows good answers to both of those questions, but he didn’t jump in with those, and what he said instead was, he said, “You know, those are really deep questions. You’re going to have to spend some time thinking through those and investigating and reading and praying.” He said, “But we’ve been talking about Jesus, and really that is the bull’s eye. That is the bull’s eye of Christianity, the Person of Jesus, the work of Jesus, specifically the biblical claim, and the claim of the apostles, that Jesus died and rose again, the resurrection of Jesus.” And that was, I think, at the point where he gave me what we call the 21-day challenge. It wasn’t in the 21-day form. But just a challenge to read the Gospel of John. It has 21 chapters. These are not like chapters in a novel. You can read a chapter in like 3-5 minutes. And so the idea of the challenge is to devote 5 minutes a day, read one chapter a day, and just ask God, say, “God, I don’t even know if You’re real. I don’t know exactly who Jesus is. I would like to know if this book is true. If it’s accurate. If this is giving me valid information and true information about Jesus, please reveal that in my heart in a way that I’ll understand it as a read. David just gave me the challenge to read the Gospel of John. He’s like, “Would you mind doing that? We’ll meet again next week, next Friday. Between now and then, get out your Bible and read it.” And I told him I would, and I’m thinking to myself at the time, “I don’t mind doing it. I’ll read it.” I didn’t say this out loud: “I’ll read it, but I already know what it says. I grew up in church. I grew up memorizing Bible verses. I know that it says Jesus died and rose again. I know that. So what good’s it going to do me opening up my Bible and reading?” And so I went home, … I was cleaning my apartment. I’m there by myself. Which I never did. And so I think this is also a divine appointment, right? And I’m dusting one of my bookshelves, and right there, between two of my psychology textbooks, is my old NIV Study Bible from when I was a kid, teenager. And it triggered my memory, and I said, “Oh, yeah! I told Pastor David that I would read the Gospel of John. I have no excuse. Here it is 6:00, 6:30 PM. I’ve got nothing to do tonight.” The semester was over at this point. Grades had been submitted. Nothing but lull time. And I’m like, “I really have no excuse,” and so I sat down there on my couch. As I opened the Bible, I thought again to myself, “What’s the point? It’s not going to make a difference. I already know what this says,” but I said, “Well, I told him I would do it, so I’m going to do it.” And I began reading. And what did you find?  Well, a lot of familiarity. Things I hadn’t thought about for years. The stories, of course, sounded very familiar. Jesus meeting the woman at the well in John 3, His discussion with Nicodemus. That was all very familiar territory. And it was… For lack of a better term, it was just fun. It was kind of fun revisiting that territory. And then I got to John chapter 11, which is halfway through. The narrative of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and what really… I would say the real turning point, at least in my brain, was His words to Martha. I think it’s John 11:25. Martha’s confused. “Why did You let our brother Lazarus die? If You had been here, he would’ve lived.” And Jesus says, “Well, your brother will rise again,” and Martha doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “In the last day, Lord. I know. At the end of time that he will rise. All of the dead will rise, so he will rise then.” And then Jesus makes that “I am” statement, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in Me, even if He dies, yet shall He live, and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die.” And then, the real kicker: “Do you believe this?” And in the context of the narrative, of course, He’s talking to Martha, but I really knew in my heart. That’s just the best way to describe it. I can’t intellectualize this. The skeptics who are listening, I don’t know a way to intellectualize this to them. I’m not trying to. I would just say, in the deepest recesses of my heart, I knew that the Christ, the Messiah, was putting the same question to me, and I knew that my answer was that that I did. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. But I knew that I did believe that.  That’s amazing! That’s amazing. So in that moment, I’m sure it was a surprise to yourself.  Yeah, it was. So at that moment, the whole concept… Pastor David had talked about who Jesus was and His resurrection was the most important question to consider, and here you are confronted with the narrative of Lazarus being resurrected, but somehow it affected you in terms of Jesus saying, “I am the resurrection.” That it was something more than just rational statement, that there was something deeply spiritual about that and deeply real. I’m sure you finished the book of John, and you met with Pastor David. Did that question of Jesus and the actual resurrection of Christ and its association with His proclamation of being the resurrection, did that come into play in terms of your belief or confirming that more intuitive deep personal belief in His statement of who He is?  Yeah. It definitely did. You know, the question comes sometimes: When was I born again? And I don’t know the answer to that question. I guess I’ll find out if it’s important. Does the time scale really matter? I don’t know. If there was a moment in time, I do look to that moment as being the moment, but I could be wrong about that. I would say, more than anything, it was a seed. It was a big seed. It was a huge seed. But it was a seed that was planted. I knew that my recognition of the truthfulness of who Jesus was and is, that He wasn’t just making a proclamation of what He had the power to do. He was talking about his identity. I didn’t say, “I can raise the dead,” he said, “I am the resurrection.” And I had never seen that before. I knew that verse. That verse sounded familiar to me, but I’d never, ever seen it in that light before, and so that was the real… What I realized at that point in time was, “This truth is going to have to change everything about my life.” There’s a lot we could go into. But to really bring all of that to fruition took another two or three years. But I could never—even though I tried. There was a point in time where I actually tried to divest myself of all of this. I wanted to go back to secularism about two years later and even tried to, but I could just never turn my back. I could never turn that off in my mind, in my heart, this truth of Jesus is the Son of God. He died, and He rose again. Everything was stripped away, back to that, but it ultimately was that truth that brought me to a point of completely surrendering my life, not just my mind, but also kind of getting off the fence of cultural Christianity, which I would say I was on for the first two or three years of this, finally getting kicked off of that fence in late 2014. It really was that truth that was the anchor. I can imagine a skeptic listening to your story and just saying, “Oh, you just had an experience. You were looking for something, and you saw what you wanted to see of Jesus when you started reading the Bible, but how does this match with your calling yourself a scientist? How can all of this, the way that you viewed superstition in the past, why don’t you view it that way now?” How do you integrate, essentially, your mind and your intellect with your beliefs? Just because you believe Jesus is the truth, which we do, and that His claim to be the resurrection is true, but how… I can just, again, hear a skeptic saying, “How can you forsake your mind and all that you know about reality?” Were the pieces able to come together?  Yeah. Well, I think that’s sort of an ongoing thing. I do decidedly come down on the Christian side of this thing now, and I can appreciate their question from their perspective. It’s genuine. It’s a good question. It’s not a question that I can really, again, over intellectualize to them. I can talk about my journey. We can, and we should, point people to resources, to sometimes what we talk about as what’s been called the legal historical case for the resurrection, the changes in the lives of the apostles, their eventual martyrdom, this being the catalyst for Christianity spreading across three continents within its first generation. There’s all of these facts, and I do talk about those a lot, but I am convinced that the Bible makes it pretty clear, going back to John chapter 3 and Jesus dialogue with Nicodemus. “Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of heaven.” He’s not talking about heaven or hell there. He talks about that in other places. He’s talking about the ability to see the work of God, right? We perceive, as scientists, as naturalists, we perceive the three-dimensional world around us. Jesus obviously is talking about something that, what would be trans dimensional, something that involves a reality that transcends the three-dimensional reality around us, and He’s saying this is the ultimate and true reality, and a human being can’t even begin to fathom that unless they’ve been born again by the Holy Spirit of God. Now, of course, that is going to sound like a cop-out to a skeptic. I get it. The only thing I can say is that I’ve experienced that, right? And I don’t know who it was. It was a brilliant mind who said that the man with a testimony is never at the mercy of a man with an intellectual argument, right? I mean I get it, but it’s kind of like you’ve got to really jump in that pool and start splashing around. If you just try to say, “Okay, this is going to be a purely intellectual endeavor to me, nothing more and nothing less. I’m just going to analyze it in a completely rational and logical sense,” I don’t think you can ever get there. I don’t think anyone is ever argued into the kingdom of God that way. There has to be the proverbial door of the heart that is at least cracked open to the possibility of this all being true. Thank you for that. And I would presume, then, that the cognitive dissonance that you had within your naturalistic materialism or atheism, that some of those issues are resolved even existentially, like being able to explain or ground your freedom to choose, or, like you say, where human dignity comes from, rights and values, or things that like, that it seems that you have a more coherent worldview, not only to think but also to experience.  Yeah. So one of the groups that we help lead on the campus of the University of Georgia now is called Ratio Christi, and it’s Latin for “a reason for Christ,” so we take on a lot of these apologetics themes and topics. My favorite recently, because I think is so timely… it’s perennial in one sense, but it’s very timely in another… is what we call the moral argument for God, that if God does not exist, then there are no objective moral truths. What is moral? What is right and wrong in a naturalistic framework is just feels. It’s a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of how many people feel strongly one way or the other. But the truth of the matter is that all sane and rational people recognize that there are certain moral truths, moral absolutes, that are not subjective. They’re not open to opinion, right? Human rights, value, things like… You can think of the extreme. Murder is wrong. If a person says it’s okay to murder, it’s not like they have the wrong opinion. They’re factually wrong. It’s not like they have the wrong opinion. They’re factually wrong. When we say racism, there’s a big one. Racism is—when I say that it’s wrong—and here my atheist friends almost always agree with me. Thank God! My agnostic friends agree with me. Buddhist, Muslim, we call could say, okay, well, when we see these racist things happening, people being the victims of race crimes, “Wow! That’s truly wrong.” That’s not just my opinion. That is a moral fact. That’s a moral absolute. I would understand that as only being possible if human beings are more than stardust. We’re not just the end result of a certain conglomeration of stardust. Being rearranged and reassembled by natural laws over billions of years can never get you to that point where we say humans have objective worth, objective dignity, objective value, and consequently, well, racism is wrong. Murder is wrong. Sexual assault is wrong. That’s not just an opinion. Those are moral facts. And so that, I would say, is one of my favorite questions and discussions to have with my skeptical friends and is certainly something I would encourage fellow believers to look into and at least ask those questions to our atheist friends. “Do you believe that humans have real dignity and worth and value? And if so, according to your worldview, what is that based upon?” And then just listen to them. Don’t try to trick them up or gotcha. That’s not the point. But really just have them think through it out loud with you. That’s great advice. Rich, it sounds like your world and your worldview both have changed dramatically, not only from the kind of more superficial Christianity you held as a child and a teenager and even early adult, but obviously changed from your militant atheism or even your agnosticism. You’ve come to a place where you seem very passionate about what you believe now and that you’re helping others to understand the same. Or at least challenging in their worldview. I take it that your world and your worldview have changed dramatically. Can you talk with me about how that has transformed your life?  I would say there was a coherency there that was lacking in my life before. I don’t think I realized at the time, but I think that postmodern secular humanism, which was a big part of what we did in UGA Atheists and that type of advocacy. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily bent towards radical individualism, but it tends in that direction, right? The emphasis being on self, charting your own path through life, doing good for others, but really in so far as much as it also benefits you. And in one sense, that’s very reasonable, but I would say what change has there been in my philosophy of life since then, just that recognition, that observation that’s so apparent in the New Testament. I think of the verse in Romans where it says that we are individually members one of another. This organism, this spiritual organism that’s what Paul calls the Temple of God, which is the church, not a temple made out of bricks and mortar and those sorts of things, but of individual souls. And just understanding that my purpose in life, the reason why I’m on this planet for however many more years that the Lord has me here, is to be a functional part of that body. We don’t all look alike. We don’t all have the same role. Paul uses the metaphor of the body. Some are hands, some are feet. Some are mouths. Some are ears in the body of Christ. And God has given me a specific role, and my life is not about the radical individualism that I used to live for. I think most people would’ve said I was a pretty good guy, you know? My peers tended to like me when I was an atheist, and I got good reviews, and people wanted to take that class, and probably in the worldly sense, people thought that I was a pretty good guy, but I know that I was very selfish. I know my life was about me and really nothing beyond that. Understanding now that the church, the body of Christ, being part of that body, announcing the kingdom, these are the things that occupy my time and thoughts and my life now. Wow! That’s amazing.  Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so going back to the time leading up to my conversion, really leaving atheism and understanding who Jesus truly is, I remember that my oldest daughter, Annabelle. Her mother, my ex-wife, was still involved in her local church and taking my daughters to Sunday school, and I received a text that says, “Annabelle is going to be baptized two Sundays from now,” and it had the date and the time. And this is while I was the faculty advisor for UGA Atheists, and so I received the text, and… I don’t know. I had mixed emotions right up front. I think it was mostly negative, like, “Why are they inviting me to this? She knows I’m not religious anymore. Is she just trying to antagonize me?” Well, clearly that was, like, okay, that’s not the case. I told a few of my skeptical friends, my atheist friends, and of course, we made the obligatory jokes about if I walked in the building the walls will start shaking and that sort of thing. But then it was actually one of those friends, one of my atheist friends, encouraged me and said, “You know, you probably should go. You probably should just go, smile, take the pictures. Be a good dad. That’s what a good dad would do. It’s not about you. It’s not about what you believe or disbelieve. Hey, you can talk to her about that later.” That’s what my friend told me, and so I said, “That’s good advice. I think that’s what I’m going to do.” And so that’s what I did. And I went there for her baptism service, and that day, sort of an unexpected thing happened in my heart, and not just that day, but following that. I really experienced a sense of joy, and it wasn’t something I was putting on. It wasn’t just an artifact of being around my daughters, which always made me happy. Well, not always, but usually. Depending on how well they were getting along. But it was a real core joy, a joy that Annabelle had embraced Jesus, and talk about cognitive dissonance. That was extreme cognitive dissonance, because I’m thinking to myself, “Here I am. I’m the faculty advisor for UGA Atheists. I talk against this religion all the time. I go out onto campus and actually try to dissuade people from believing in a personal God and specifically the God of the Bible, and now one of the three people that I love the most on this planet, that I have certainly the deepest affections for, has made this… whatever you want to call it… personal decision for Christ, received Christ, decided to follow Christ, and I’m not angry about this. I’m actually joyful. That’s really confusing to me. If I’m sure that it’s false, if I’m sure she’s making a bad decision by doing this, shouldn’t I be angry? Shouldn’t I have some sense of righteous indignation, where I want to go and talk her out of this, and that’s just not at all where I found myself. so this was very much the preliminary changes that were getting me to a point where I knew that atheism wasn’t a good fit and I wasn’t going to continue staying with… I would’ve still considered myself very much a secular humanist. I had no intention of changing that. But on the spirituality topic, it was more of like, “Okay, I’m certainly open to spiritual possibilities now.  So, Rich, as we’re winding up your story, and it’s just really amazing, and it sounds like you have a lot of experience, not only as a skeptic but talking to skeptics. If you have any advice for the curious skeptic who might be listening in, what would that be?  Yeah. So what I would say is truth exists, and truth matters. One of the things I really liked about the Atheist Movement… I know that sounds strange to say that, but I do believe that this is a good thing, is that myself at the time, and most committed atheists that I talk to today, would affirm that objective truth exists, right? Most of the atheists I talk to are not proponents of relative truth in the ultimate sense. They would say that there is such a thing as ultimate reality, that it has a certain nature, and that we can have discourse and discussion about those things because truth is a meeting ground, right? More than anything, that’s what truth does. It unites and it divides, but it is there, and our quest should be to… It just popped into my mind. One of the things that Matt Dillahunty used to say, of all people; he said, “I want to believe as many true things as possible and reject as many false things as possible.” I think that’s great. That’s one of the best quotes that we could bring to the table here. I do believe that truth exists, and going back to Christ, His claim was not just to teach the truth, His claim was to be the truth. He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through Me.” And I do believe that a person with an open mind, a posture of honesty at heart, being willing to go where the information leads, will see Jesus, will come to see Jesus in an entirely new light. Yeah. And I would imagine, based upon your own experience, too, reading the Gospel of John is probably a good place to start.  Yeah. Absolutely. Any of the gospels. I have a fondness for the Gospel of John, but if you want to do the 16-day challenge, hey, you can do Mark. It’s not quite as much of a commitment. Yeah. That sounds good. Kind of short and sweet. He’s a very pragmatic writer. So if there are Christians today… Obviously, there were Christians who played a role in your life in terms of bringing you towards what you now believe as truth, like that pastor, Pastor David.  David Holt. Yeah. Yeah. How would you encourage us as Christians to engage or interact with those who are skeptical or don’t believe?  Yeah, so if you’ll allow me, I’ll preach to myself a little bit. Because I always have to remind myself. I like to debate. I’ve always liked that, regardless of which end of this I’ve been on. It’s always been extremely enjoyable to me for people to push back, and let’s butt heads a little bit. Not in a mean-spirited way, but let’s exchange ideas, and I’ve come to realize that not everyone has the same affinity for that as I have. And there is very much a necessary role of being good listeners. Knowing some good questions, right? They don’t have to be enormously complex. We meet people all of the time. The Great Exchange questions are a great starting point. What was your spiritual background like? Do you believe in God? If so, what is God like? And even if the person expresses disbelief, then well, “Who in your opinion is Jesus of Nazareth?” I think that’s one of the best questions, possibly the best question that we can ask. We don’t ask them telling them what they believe, again. We just ask them because we really want to know. If a person is going to be intellectually honest, then they’re going to have to do something with this historical figure. The person, the man who has undeniably influenced the history of the world more than any other person. What is true about him. What can we know about him? Why did he leave such an enormous impact. And I think those are fair questions for anyone. I think that’s great advice. Yeah. I can almost see Jesus turning to His apostles and saying, “Who do you say that I am?” And that is the biggest question for everyone. So thank you. That’s very wise. I mean, your story, it has such an arc to it, from embracing some form of Christianity, dismissing it, militant atheism, but then being drawn back to truth. I mean, truth has been a major thread throughout, from the beginning to the end, and Rich, I want to thank you for coming on board to tell your story. I’m sure many people will enjoy it, relate to it, and really be inspired by it, so thank you for the wisdom that you’ve given us today.  Absolutely. It’s been a real joy. Thank you.  Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Rich’s story. You can find out more about him by visiting his website askaformeratheist.com, and we’ll include that link, along with the link to his work at Ratio Christi, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at sidebstories@gmail.com. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, that you will rate and subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.   

Former atheist Leah Libresco rejected religious belief until she encountered intelligent Christians at Yale University. Her search to find the grounding of objective morality led her to God. Resources written by Leah: Website:  www.leahlibresco.com  Book:  Arriving at Amen (the story of her conversion from atheist to Catholic) Book:  Building the Benedict Option (a guide to building thicker Christian community) Resources/authors mentioned by Leah: CS Lewis GK Chesterton Allister McIntyre, After Virtue 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 who became a Christian against all odds. You can also hear today’s story, along with other short video testimonies from former atheists, on our Side B Stories website.  Oftentimes, we think that atheists have nothing in common with those who believe in God, but that’s not necessarily true. Both points of view can equally acknowledge the existence of certain parts of reality, but they have different explanations about what something is and how it came to be. One of those hot topics of debates between atheists and Christians is something we all have a very deep intuition about, that there are certain things or actions in our world that are really right or really wrong, not merely for ourselves but for everyone. As C.S. Lewis says, if someone cuts in line, we automatically think that’s unfair according to some commonly understood rule or standard of fairness, and that’s certainly the case for much more serious points of injustice.  It doesn’t take a lot of time to consider whether or not certain things are more like vices or virtues.  In our own minds, we are constantly making judgments about whether or not something or another should or should not be the case, whether or not someone ought or ought not to do something. We simply can’t help ourselves in the way that we are constantly judging.  The problem is not that we can’t or don’t know what’s right or wrong. The problem isn’t even that we aren’t capable of living good lives with or without God. The problem is, rather, where we ground those moral duties and obligations as true and real, not merely opinion or preference.  From an atheist household, Leah Libresco learned to critically analyze ideas from a very early age, fostered into her Ivy League education and beyond. Her intellect drove her to deeply consider the seeming difficulties that lie with the problem of objective morality. It led her to reconsider God. Let’s listen to her story:  Welcome to the Side B Stories Podcast, Leah. It’s so great to have you with me today.  Thank you so much for having me. Leah, so the audience knows who you are, a little bit about you, your education, why don’t you give us an idea of where you live. Are you married? Do you have children? Any of that.  Yeah. I grew up in New York. I went to Yale University, where I studied political science, and now I live in northern Virginia with my husband and our two daughters. Oh, wonderful! Wonderful. So let’s start back… You said that you were born or grew up in Long Island? Is that right?  That’s right. All right! So you’re from the big city. So why don’t you walk us back to the early part of your life and growing up. Tell me about your family, about your culture. Was God any part of that picture at all?  I’m from about 40 minutes by train outside the big city. So growing up, that was definitely a big part of my life. I’d go to the Museum of Natural History for my birthday almost every year. But my family wasn’t religious, and I grew up in a community that was mostly nonreligious. I think there probably were some people of faith in the surrounding community, but not in a way I noticed. I didn’t know anyone who believed in God personally that I knew of. So it just wasn’t part of your world at all. It was part of my world, in that I knew there were people who were Christians in the world, but not knowing any personally, that meant Christianity was mostly relevant to my life when it made the news, and that was usually in a bad way. Ah, ah. Yes. That seems to happen a lot, where Christianity gets a very uniquely distorted picture from the news and from the arts many times, and it sounds like you grew up in a very culturally enriched environment, but also heard, obviously, things from the news and that sort of thing about faith or Christians or Christianity. Did you say that you were raised a secular Jew?  My family is Jewish in our background, but it’s long enough since anyone practiced that we don’t remember the last person to practice. So my family was Jewish by heritage but not particularly in practice in any way. Okay, so it was more of a cultural, like affiliation, but you didn’t practice the high holy days or any of that.  No. The closest we got is that we watched the Shari Lewis Chanukah on TV, which I assumed everyone watched growing up, but I have the impression that may not be true. Okay. So growing up in this environment, you had religion, I guess, as part of the cultural background, and you had bits and pieces of religion in your culture, I guess, with regard to just what happened in the city or in your environment. What did you think religion was growing up? Obviously, it wasn’t for you or for your family. What was it in your mind?  I thought it was a mistake. I thought it was a mistake people held onto for a long time, in the same way you can have a theory of disease or a theory of physics that’s outmoded, but it takes a while for people to be comfortable with the truth that we understand better. You know, even in what you’d think of as a hard science, like astrophysics, there will be a long transition where people who are very invested in an old model of the world don’t find a new model satisfying. And that’s kind of what I thought Christians were, people who had a false model of the world and who were having trouble adjusting to a true, newer model. So it was an outmoded way of thinking about reality, about the world. Is that something that was informed, not only by your family, but by your education as well? Were you interested in the world of ideas? What shaped your thinking about all of that?  Absolutely! Well, I was a teenager during kind of the heyday of the New Atheists, of people like Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc., and I think a lot of the way they wrote was really focused on the threat of religion, the sense that religion wasn’t just wrong in a passive, ignorable way, but it changed people’s lives for the worse. It kind of focused on flash points of conflict, teaching evolution in public schools in some parts of the country, and that made it feel more urgent as an error to correct than just a different mistake people might make. That’s an interesting way of looking at it, because certainly the New Atheists were very strong in their rhetoric against religion, that it was a poisonous thing that needed to be extricated from society, that it was not good for, I guess, mankind or for the world. Did you affiliate basically with their ideas? Did you believe in the way that they believed in this anti-theist kind of way?  I definitely did. And I will say they pay religion a kind of compliment that people who don’t believe but are willing just to tolerate it don’t, which is that they think religion makes serious claims that matter, that change your life, and if the under-girding logic for those claims isn’t true, then those ways you’d change your life don’t work. And in some ways I find that, now as a Christian, still more respectful than just saying, as someone did to me after I converted, “Well, whatever makes you happy.” And I said, “I don’t care what makes me happy. I care what’s true, and I would hope that, as my friend, you’d care about that for me also.” Right. So truth was important for you, even as someone who especially as someone who was intellectually minded, who pursued not only your education in a serious way, but truth was very important to your life and the way you thought about things. Why don’t you talk with me a little bit about that, especially as you’re moving in towards higher education and how you made sense of reality in a sense? we all want to make sense of reality, intellectually, existentially, we want to embrace a worldview that makes sense of our worldview and of our world in a comprehensive way that matches with what we know and experience. And you are a very thoughtful kind of brilliant mind, I think, who was pursuing those kinds of things. So tell us a little bit about that. Walk us through who you were more intellectually.  Well, it’s funny because in some ways, looking back, I see the movement of the Holy Spirit in things like my math classes. Because math was a place where I was really getting to dig deeply into hard questions about what’s real. What’s at the bedrock of what’s real. That’s not always how math is taught, which is a shame, because math is a philosophical proposition, as well as a set of formulas. Its claims about how do we know what’s true? How can we best explore it? And I loved that! It felt urgent and exciting and beautiful and difficult. And it had that sense that it does take work. These questions aren’t easy to answer, but you can be part of a tradition that’s exploring them. You can have a shared set of tools, a shared way of deciding, “These are our axioms. Here’s how we can extend from them to figure out the next true thing we can uncover.” I think the core thing I got from mathematics, which then I brought to philosophy also, was that when we look for the truth, we’re like archaeologists. We’re uncovering something that’s already been laid out before us and trying to make sure we don’t damage it or misinterpret it as we pick it up. We’re not architects who get to build things to suit ourselves. Everything we receive is a gift. So you were not necessarily of the postmodern ilk of creating your own truth or believing in relative truth as it were, but rather you were discovering truth, like in mathematics. That it was something to be found and not something to be created. That is a very, I would say, intellectually honest pursuit towards truth, and really, in a sense, almost counter-cultural to what was happening in the postmodern world, but you speak of things like math, which was a little bit more, I guess, objective in its nature. But I’m curious, too, as you’re moving along, and I presume that you identified as an atheist. Is that right?  Absolutely. In your atheism, as someone who pursues truth, a pursuer of truth, did you look at the existential or even intellectual implications of your own worldview? As you were pursuing these kind of grander and almost abstract concepts in philosophy and in math, what about the existential implications of atheism and naturalism or materialism or whatever you worldview you embraced?  Well, this is where I found parts of the New Atheist movement a little dissatisfying. Because I’d say that a lot of the people participating in it in good faith were focused primarily on shoring up defenses against religion, or on arguing people out of religion. I think that came from a feeling of being very embattled in America, that people felt so under threat as atheists that there was no room for what you might think of as the luxury of expanding their own philosophy, articulating their own view. It was just about clearing space. But I felt we had some space, and that, if you were going to try to argue people out of religion, you had to argue them into something else. Being an atheist wasn’t my philosophical identity because you can’t simply not believe in something as your creed. What I was initially was someone who was a deontologist stoic. I was interested in an articulation of moral law that was really rules based, rather than outcome based. What’s the right thing to do, no matter what happens, and I cared a lot about what’s in my control? How do I not become attached to things that aren’t in my control and focus all my efforts on where I can make a difference? And so what was frustrating at the broader atheist movement is it didn’t seem interested enough in what I thought was the really fascinating question. I thought religion was a boring question, so I wanted more space to argue about how should we live our lives? Where do we acquire our sense of the good? How do we fight each other about where those senses differ, so that we can uncover the truth collaboratively, if pugilistically. Did you ever see any religious people engaging in a deep way in those kinds of discussions? If you got bits and pieces of religion based upon political or perhaps provocative statements or caricaturing in the wider culture, what did you think of Christians? And again, were they engaging in these kinds of deep discussions? Well, this is where I really lucked out. Because when I went to Yale I joined a political debating group that wasn’t what you might think of as a debate team, where you’re assigned sides at random and you’re kind of seeing how well you can argue for any given idea. This was a philosophical debating circle, where people were arguing only for what they actually believed, because the goal was to change people’s minds, and it was be terrible to argue so well for something you thought was false you changed someone’s mind to that! Yes.  And so that was where I was meeting really interesting, smart Christians, who obviously didn’t believe their faith just out of an obligation to their parents or unaware of questions people might ask about it. Some of them were also converts who had considered it and then cleaved to it, and I was given such a gift in spending every Thursday night and every Tuesday night—we met twice a week—arguing until late in the night about any kind of philosophical or ethical question and seeing how people thought about it. And what under-girded their philosophy. So were you surprised that there were serious-minded Christians who actually thought deeply about these things? Because I know, again, there’s oftentimes a negative stereotyping or caricaturing of who Christians are, and I wonder if any of those negative stereotypes were broken down by actually meeting someone who was so other than what you expected.  I was surprised. And I also had the benefit of learning the gap between what my Christian friends actually believed and some of the lowest common denominator rebuttals to Christianity that were prevalent among New Atheists. There were ways in which, as I talked to friends, especially Catholic friends, about, “Well, how do you sort out, if everyone has different interpretations of the Bible, how do you have any trust that you’re right?” What they articulated about the magisterium and tradition sounded more like what I was used to in mathematics. You know, we have a long history of how we interpret this. We have processes for adjudicating what’s right. Figuring out something new if someone poses a new question takes a while because we’re cautious about what we articulate as true because we have this deposit of faith it’s our duty to safeguard, not just kind of spout off about. So obviously, you were able to appreciate, I guess, with this meaningful debate, that the history of Christianity or belief in God has some substance and some longevity and some, I guess, long intentionality, that these concepts and ideas have been discussed and thought about for a long time now. Of course, that in and of itself doesn’t make it true, and you are a truth seeker. So I’m curious. As you were going through these debates on Thursday nights, was it making you question your own view of reality or truth? Or was it opening you towards some potential other explanations of reality?  I think one of the things that really changed for me is I didn’t think Christianity was self refuting, which is what I would have said, that the claims were incoherent. They didn’t hold together. That you had to ignore big gaps to remain a Christian if you looked at it. And instead, I didn’t think it was true, but gradually, especially through reading C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, who both made a big difference to me. I thought of it as something that held together from the inside that I thought still was false, but it’s the difference almost between a well-written fantasy or sci-fi book, where you could imagine that that whole world works. It isn’t true. It isn’t where we live. We’re not in this intergalactic civilization, but it feels real, versus the ones that kind of feel thin, that the author didn’t think it all the way through. You can’t imagine the story could continue outside the confines of the book because it isn’t well thought through. It isn’t a full, rich world. And Christianity shifted for me from being one of those kind of schlock y books to being something that could work if it were true. And there were even parts I found attractive about it, but I didn’t think it was true, and I could never believe in something, no matter how well constructed, if it wasn’t founded on truth. And meanwhile, my own atheism, as I explored it, as I tussled with my friends, it had gaps. It had questions it didn’t answer well, but there was nothing in it I thought was false, so I kind of had the juxtaposition of what you almost might think of as a beautiful, filigreed clock, all put together very well, with centuries of labor, to see how you can get the pieces to inter-mesh, that wasn’t on, that wasn’t running, that wasn’t true, animated by something true, and that was Catholicism. And then on the other hand, I had this patchwork sail with big rents in it and ugly seams, and that was my atheism, but there was nothing in it I didn’t believe. And I figured I had a great deal of the rest of my life to try and make sure I kept working on it and filled in the gaps. Now, this patchwork sail. You said that there were some rented areas, I guess you could say, of fabric that were a little bit more difficult to take, or really, I guess, understand. Or unanswered questions. Were there any that were so unsettling that it caused you to look beyond atheism? I mean, at the time, it sounds like you really believed that it was true. It just wasn’t perhaps as comprehensive of an explanation as you wanted. What were the tears in the fabric for you? I think one of the unsettling things was when I moved beyond what I said. Deontology was where I started. A sense of what are the rules? How do you derive these rules? And a certain belief you can derive them logically. You can follow something like the categorical imperative. Whatever I do has to be something I could will for everyone to do. It can’t be a special rule just for me. But I found that that wasn’t as satisfying as I wanted, in part because I realized—and this is partly my own faults and my own sinfulness at the time—because I cared so much about doing the right thing, especially when it was hardest, I found that I was sort of rooting for other people to be bad, so that I could be best! Because it doesn’t feel like there’s as much virtue in being kind to someone who’s kind to you. It feels more satisfying to go, “I’m extremely kind to someone who is unpleasant to me.” And so I wanted to be able to distinguish my virtue in a way that I realized didn’t work. Didn’t work according to the very standards that I cared about, of universalizing things, of not treating myself as a special moral actor. And I wound up more and more attracted to the claims of virtue ethics, which, instead of kind of starting from a rule book and just how well can I follow the rules, says, “How well can I become the person I am meant to be?” It’s a teleological view. It’s aimed at something. It doesn’t require that morality is something that’s so hard but we do it anyway. It says, in some senses, what I’m made for. And I read a book, After Virtue, by Alasdair Macintyre, that was making this case. It was very moving. I was so excited. I took it, at the time, to the Catholic friend I was most often talking about these questions with, and I said, “Well, this is what I believe. This is what I want to work on as an atheist,” and he said, “Well, you know Macintyre became Catholic, right? He didn’t find that this worked.” And I was so mad, at Macintyre specifically. For giving up. And I was like, “Well, I’m not going to wuss out like Macintyre did. I’m going to keep developing this theory of virtue ethics as an atheist.” Of course, you know where this ended up for me also. So how far along did you go along that trail? Of really trying to kick against the goads as it were? It strikes me funny, too. You speak of, especially in your deontology, that it didn’t feel good to be kind to someone who was just kind to you, but you wanted to be able to love your enemies, or something to that effect. I wonder if Jesus’ ethics even came into that somewhere along the way. It’s like, “Wow! It sounds like your desires were something along the lines of the difficult ethics of Jesus.”  I think you’re giving me too much credit, though, because of course when you love your enemy, you love your enemy for their sake, or even for God’s sake, for loving them the way God’s loves them. But I wanted to love them in the sense of, and then I will be so strong. It’s almost virtuous bench pressing, right? Like loving my enemies is bench pressing 500 pounds, and I want to do that. I don’t just want to love nice people, so it’s just the bar, empty. Right, right. So, again, you were frustrated that Macintyre actually relented in some way, that he betrayed you in some way and became a Catholic, a believer in God. So then you wanted to become this stalwart defender of virtue ethics. So where did that take you?  Well, so ultimately it took me to what felt like, not a dead end, but a wall I couldn’t see my way past. Something I had to build something new or uncover something new to get over. And that problem was that, if virtue ethics is teleological, if it’s aimed at something, the question is, “Where do I get the sense of who I’m meant to be?” This sense of the final end of man. That’s a different way of framing morality than just, “Let me think logically about what’s fair to everyone.” And that was where I got stuck. Because it felt like morality was a lot like math, which is how I’d felt the whole time in some way. It was real. It was separate from me. It was transcendent. And the question was: How do I come to have knowledge of it? For math, I didn’t think it was that weird. You’ll find people who disagree, but I found the old kind of Plato explanation pretty satisfying. I can look around the world. I can see my two hands. I can see my two shoes, and go, “Well, my hands and my shoes are of different types, but there’s something that’s the same about them, and it’s that there’s two of each of them. There’s some separate thing that they participate in, and it’s bigger than them. It’s the concept of two itself.” And I found this satisfying for math. You can kind of sneak your way that way into getting the natural numbers, and then if you have the natural numbers, one, two, three, etc., you can get to basically anywhere else in math from there. It just takes a really long time. But it felt like there was a foundation. These things are different than the physical world. I can see them in the physical world, but they’re more than just that. And when it came to morality, I didn’t have a good way to get there. I thought, “I can claim that I’m doing it the same way.” I can say, “Well, I see someone defrauding an old woman, and I see someone kicking a puppy, and I go, ‘How are these things alike? They both participate in the form of injustice.’” And I think they do, but I don’t think that’s how I work it out. And I couldn’t say with a straight face that was how. The numbers are a lot more obvious than injustice. It didn’t feel like I worked it out by comparing, “How are these things similar?” but like I already knew something about injustice and recognized it in each of them. And the problem was, “How do I know?” “How do I, someone who’s not transcendent, come to have knowledge of the transcendent?”  So that was a conundrum for you. A turning point or a pivoting because, when you’re dealing with these transcendent concepts and realities, like you say, that’s one thing, and as you’re speaking, too, I’m also thinking the teleological nature even of virtue ethics, it’s going somewhere. And that also is a transcendently grounded kind of concept even, rather than things just are.  Exactly. There’s an ought-ness. There’s a way things ought to be. And that’s how we know how to go from A to B, or that we’re getting better, in a sense, or progressing. So I can see, from an atheistic perspective, your worldview breaking down. Somehow these tears and rents are getting larger and more difficult for you. So was this a turning point then, at which you said, “Okay, there has to be a transcendent source. There has to be something more, someone more.”  Well, it’s kind of funny because it was a… This was the thing that made a turning point possible, but that was kind of a simmering problem. I thought, “I’ll just keep reading. I’ll keep discussing. I’ll see what I can do with this,” and then the bigger moment that this was laying the groundwork for kind of came when I was back at college, after I’d graduated, for an alumni debate. And I just had such a strange feeling while I was there. We weren’t debating a topic related specifically to religion. But I could tell that I sounded like the Catholics, even though they were on different sides of the resolution. It wasn’t that they all believed the same thing. It was a topic like “resolve nationalize the curriculum.” It was something that’s prudential. People can be on different sides. But what they were appealing to and the way they reasoned all sounded similar. They were part of one conversation, and so was I! Which was weird! And I could tell, kind of, if you came into the room and didn’t know anything about religion, and you were just trying to group people in the room based on, “Who sounds like they agree on the fundamentals here?” that I was with them, and this bothered me. I bet!  So after the debate, it kept bothering me, and we were having a toasting session, where we make toasts, we pass around a big cup, and I just had the impulse that I should toast the Nicene creed and become Catholic. And that didn’t really make any sense to me, and I thought out, “Well, that’s crazy. Because first of all, I don’t think I know the whole Nicene creed by heart. Second of all, I think toasting the Nicene creed at a debating event is actually not how you become Catholic. Of course, you go through a process of RCIA, and if I were going to become Catholic, I should do it in a Catholic way, not in a weird debate culture way. And third, I don’t believe in God.” And come to think of it, three should have really been one. I don’t know what that was doing as last on my list. And that night, I gave some other cop-out toast. I was just troubled by this. And what was worst is, three months later, I came back for another alumni debate. We have them a lot because we’re all weirdos. And the same thing was happening to me during the debate, that same feeling of which side I was on. So I skipped toasting. I didn’t want to go to toasting. Because I thought, “I don’t want the same stupid problem again.” And so I kind of laid out for him what I’ve been talking to you about, this problem of, “I’m more certain that morality is transcendent. I’m not willing to let go of that, but I can’t articulate how I come to have knowledge of it, and that’s where I’m stuck.” And so did he, through your conversation, help you resolve this? Or come to a place of awareness or decision?  Well, what was great is that, I’d been talking through what I talked through with you, that sense of, “Well, I have this feeling about how this can work for math and not about how it works for ethics,” and Ben said, finally, “Well, you’ve kind of gone over with me what doesn’t work for you, but there doesn’t feel like there’s any point in wallowing in that, or continuing to explore it. No matter what, you need to think of something new. So if it’s not that kind of platonic ladder building up, what do you want to think about next?” And I’d spent so much time kind of working the problem over and over in the same place, that that space of freedom to just think of something else… I said, without really thinking about it, “I guess morality just loves me or something.” That’s an unusual statement.  It is! And Ben looked pretty pleased when I said it, but I really needed a second then, to sit with it. I’d said it, but did I believe it? And the more I sat with it, the more I did, that if there’s something I have that I can’t reach myself, then I can’t give up the truth that I hold. The question is, “How do I have it?” If I can’t build something up, then it must’ve com e down to me. And once I’m talking about morality that way, I can’t be talking about some kind of inert rule book, because a rule book doesn’t move, right? I’m talking about the form of the good no longer just as a static form, but as an agent, something that acts. And so once I’m talking about goodness itself in some sense as a being that acts, that not just acts or moves but loves, that does this for me. I could recognize who was talking about. Goodness itself lowering Himself to take the form of the slave for my sake personally, for yours personally. I knew I was talking about God and not in some broad encyclopedia entry of God, but I was talking about the incarnation. Well, that’s a tremendous shift. I mean, that realization that morality loves. I would say that that was a major shift in your understanding and even acceptance of that new way of really looking at the source of morality itself. So I presume that was a turning point for you.  It was. The next morning was the first time I ever went to church as someone who believed it was true. I’d gone with friends in college, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with it, but that night with Ben was the night before Palm Sunday, and so then I went to church the next day believing that it was God there on the altar, that we were talking about historical truths of what had happened in the entrance into Jerusalem and then what happened after that. That was kind of the conversion of heart of coming to believe that God was, but the preparation to enter the church and kind of the constant conversion that makes up anyone’s life is now not just believing that God is, but knowing Him, spending time with Him, developing a friendship with Him, in a way that even I, as a big math enthusiast, can’t say that I have a personal relationship with the Pythagorean theorem. That was really a big shift also. From, as an atheist, wrestling with the question of God as an intellectual proposition, versus, once that had been settled, coming to know Him. So as a truth seeker you not only pursued truth as a proposition but truth as a person now, it sounds like. But now you’ve somehow embraced a story which some, I guess, atheists would say, “Well, it’s still not real, and it’s still not true,” but for you it sounds like it is. That it is the true story of reality. Is that what I’m hearing from you?  Well, except that I would never say, “For me, it’s true.” What’s true is true for everyone. What changed wasn’t what was true for me but what I understood about the world, but everything that’s true was already true. It’s just a question of whether I know about it yet. Oh, oh. That’s wonderful. Well, this has been a very insightful conversation. I think your conversion from atheism to Christianity is obviously very intellectual, but it’s also very, very personal. As we’re wrapping up, because it sounds like you’ve had a tremendous life change but that there are also very skeptical intellectual atheists who are listening to this podcast. If you had something to say to them in terms of their own pursuit of what is true, what words would you have to offer for them?  I think the encouraging thing is it’s always worth pursuing what’s true and that you can turn to your friends as a way of exploring ideas, of really delving into tough questions in a way that will strengthen your friendship. I was friends with a great number of Catholics before I converted. I’m still friends with a number of people who aren’t. And in all those cases, as long as we were arguing with the sense of we both love the truth and we want to live in the truth together, exploring those questions made us closer friends. It didn’t pull us apart. I think there’s a real maturity and grace that comes with that ability to discuss and to debate even ideas without it being a negative exercise, and you obviously have the grace and the intellect to be able to do that well, and I think we can all learn from you in that. And for the Christians who are listening, obviously we can all take a cue from what you just said to the skeptic, but did you want to add anything with regard to how you would encourage Christians to engage with atheists or nonbelievers? In a sense, Ben did a beautiful job, I think, in leading you to think more deeply about your own ideas. What would you say to the Christian?  I think it’s to be confident that God is working in everyone’s life and is calling them by name. And in my case, that calling didn’t look like a calling to church for me. It looked like an interest in mathematics, but looking for wherever your friend is ardently pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful, strengthening that desire, and then really not so much trying to divert them from that but to say, “I have something even more to offer you.” I wanted to know what was good and what was true. And I didn’t think there was a person behind it. I would have been satisfied with a rule book! And the surprise is that God is always responding to our desires for something bigger and better than what we think we’re pursing when we aren’t pursuing Him. That’s really wonderful. Well, Leah, thank you again so much for giving of your time and telling us your story, and I know that there are some ways that, when people are listening, they’ll want to know more or hear more about you, and we will include some of those contact points in our episode notes. If you want to add something here, you’re more than welcome.  Yeah, so after I converted, I had that conversion of the intellect, I did write a book, Arriving at Amen, that’s more about the conversion of heart that followed, of learning to pray, learning to think with God instead of just to think about God. And then, a little while after that, I’ve written a second book called, Building the Benedict Option, and that’s about building deeper Christian community wherever you are. Something you can do in the next 4-6 weeks, not something that has to wait for everything in your life to be settled. Those sound like wonderful resources, and we will definitely include those in the episode notes, as well as any websites or connections with you. Thank you again, Leah, for coming on. It’s been a true blessing.  Thank you so much for having me. Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Leah’s story. You can find out more about Leah by visiting her website at www.leahlibresco.com. We’ll include this website, along with her books, in our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at info@sidebstories.com. I hope you enjoyed it, that you’ll rate, subscribe, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where another skeptic will flip the record of their life. 

Former atheist Stacy Gleiss traveled across the world and explored worldviews and philosophies until she finally found what was true, good, and beautiful in Christianity.   Stacy’s Philosophy Group: Philosophy in the Forest: http://philosophyintheforest.com   Authors and Books recommended by Stacy: Soren Kierkegaard Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Stories podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to a former skeptic or atheist who unexpectedly became a Christian. On the surface, in a world without God life seems so free. Someone can live without constraints of religion and morality without someone or someone telling you who you are or who you ought to be. You can dream and idealize. You can create and recreate yourself and your identity, your own meaning and your own purpose, pursuing it on your own terms. You can design yourself in your own life, free from criticism or control except for yourself.  It’s called expressive individualism. But oftentimes the underbelly of this pursuit begins to show. The idealism begins to crumble, and the dreams begin to fade. Satisfaction fades to that which is elusive and fleeting. Temporary pleasure erodes into long-term pain. Poor choices result in deep pain and regret. Perhaps we are not the best judge after all. Perhaps our identity and our ideal cannot be found in what we want or what we think is best for ourselves. After all, identity is fragile if it’s based upon our own passing whims and desires. Meaning becomes meaningless if it’s only determined by what we create or deem important. Temporary pursuits gratify for the moment, but lasting satisfaction seems an ever-elusive dream. As one of the wisest men who ever lived said, it’s like chasing after the wind, and we know that when we sow the wind, we often reap a whirlwind. We cannot run from ourselves and our own brokenness.  Our story today touches on these personal realities. Searching for identity and meaning and purpose on her own terms, yet finding herself in dark realities and desperate places. Is there something more than this, Someone who can provide a life that is true and good and beautiful?  Let’s listen to Stacy tell her story of moving from darkness to light, from a kind of death to life that is truly life. Welcome to Side B Stories, Stacy, it’s so great to have you with me today.  Well, thank you for the opportunity. I’m really happy to be talking to you today. Wonderful. It’s great to have you. So our listeners know a little bit about you, Stacy, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.  Well, my husband and I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is the northernmost part, so it’s very cold, and we enjoy a lot of outdoor sports, fishing, hunting, hiking, and so on, and a lot of my time is spent with a tiny house mission center called Philosophy in the Forest. Well, that sounds intriguing, and I would like to come back to that a little bit later and find out more about what Philosophy in the Forest is. So why don’t we get started with your story. Were you raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Has that upper Midwest region of the US been your home since you were a child? Where did you begin your life? And tell us a little bit about your family, whether or not there was any religious belief or anything associated with that?  Yes. So I grew up in Michigan, in lower Michigan, the lower peninsula, the mitten part, as they say, and I lived on my grandfather’s farm for a good bit of the time. We lived in a rural area. We were not religious. My parents did not talk about God. I don’t even think we owned a Bible. So I didn’t have a religious upbringing, but when I was about 12, my family joined the Mormon church, so we went from 0 to 100, you know? Because that’s a very active, involved faith. There must have been a strong Mormon community around you, I’m guessing? Is that how your family got acclimated or involved with the Mormon church?  No, actually it was pretty rare when I was a child. There weren’t that many Mormons around, but my aunts, my father’s sisters, had joined the church at a certain point, and they kind of brought missionaries around us. Oh, I see. So you had some influence of Mormonism in your life, and I’ll explore that in a moment, but did you have any historical or orthodox Christianity or any form of Christianity around you at all? You said you grew up without much reference to God in your family, but I wonder in your friendships, relationships, in your culture, was there much of Christianity around you?  Not that I sensed really. I mean, there’s churches everywhere, and you kind of have an idea that a lot of people are Christian, but I didn’t really have any interactions with that until we became Mormon. Okay. So like you said, back to this Mormon faith, I know that Mormonism does require quite a fully orbed belonging, as well as belief. How long were you and your family in the Mormon faith, and is it something that you embraced personally?  Well, first I think my parents may have been in about five years, but I left the church a little earlier than they did. First of all, for me, as far as beliefs, I didn’t believe it. Instinctively, there’s such a concentration on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon that you don’t get enough about Jesus and God, which they do talk about, but it’s kind of overridden by Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, so I knew that there wasn’t an ancient people living in North America. Pretty much American Indians came here first, so I knew instinctively it wasn’t true, but I was going for social reasons and kind of putting up with it because Mormon kids were nice, nicer than the average kids that I grew up with or were in my school. And I had a lot of rejection issues because of a disfiguring accident when I was five, so the Mormon kids were nicer, and I liked the activities, so on that front, it was good. On the truth front, not so good. Okay. So it was a great placing of belonging and building friendships and relationships but not so much in terms of substance of belief.  True. So even through all of that, belief in a real God or Jesus or anything just wasn’t even on the radar? No. But you said that your family left after five years and you left before that. What caused you to leave if it was a good place of belonging?  Well, it was kind of accidental. It was kind of a passive exit, I guess. It was a casualty of a change in my life that happened when I was 16. I went on a cultural exchange trip to Japan. I became very infatuated with the culture. I saw it as a place of acceptance and meaning, and there was a layer of spirituality with Buddhism there that I thought was interesting, and so I became infatuated with it, and I was quite determined to live there, to the degree that I married a Japanese man at 18. Okay. Well, that’s a major pivot in your life.  It is. When you’re moving from American culture to the Japanese culture, I’m sure there’s quite a lot of cultural adaptation, much less expectations as a wife, and then also you mentioned the spiritual aspect of Japan, which is a lot more Eastern in its influence. Let’s start with the spiritual influence there. You moved from a very kind of Western understanding of a potential for a Judeo-Christian God, but you moved into an environment in which it was, in many religions, even godless. You mentioned Buddhism and that you married someone. Did his family embrace that kind of Eastern religion or spirituality?  Yes. So you mentioned about the change from a Judeo-Christian American culture. I traded in my culture really not knowing very much, so it was pretty challenging, so whatever I’m telling you wasn’t immediately obvious. I saw all the interesting things about Japan and the acceptance, and I just jumped headlong in, and then I would learn more about the faith. For example, it seems like Buddhism is more of an over layer to their culture. It’s more recent for them. Because their ancient worldview is more feudalistic, honor, shame, the typical things you might think of, and then also a paganistic polytheism, so that’s kind of the under worldview, and then the over worldview has the Buddhist elements, which are a little more, I think, peaceful feeling in a way. And calm. Meditation and everything you might think of with Buddhism. Did you embrace that personally?  I think I would have liked to get involved with Buddhism a bit. His parents were definitely Buddhist, and he said he was Buddhist, but he never practiced it. He didn’t pray at the altars or the temples, so sometimes I would sneak in and pray for something at the family altar or at a temple, kind of say a quick prayer for acceptance and for understanding of what it was I was facing, spiritually and otherwise. But he never did those things. And I would come to learn that he had more of an older, ancient culture perspective, the guilt/shame culture and that kind of thing. He was very proud of their warring history, so he really liked that underside and kind of mocked, actually, any spirituality. So that came to affect me, obviously. I felt acceptance from his parents and from the neighbors, actually, but a lot of rejection in the home, under that kind of underside of the culture, which is more guilt/shame, I guess. I would imagine that would be quite difficult, in terms of coming from the individualism and freedom associated in the US, particularly the rise even of feminism, and you’re talking about the eighties, so a lot of that had happened in that time, and when you go to a culture like Japan, where things aren’t quite the same, I would imagine that would’ve been challenging in your life. Did you stay in Japan for very long? You said you moved back to the US.  Yeah. We didn’t stay in Japan as long as I thought we were going to. So we ended up coming back to the US, and then I had children, but even here in Michigan, downstate, especially in the eighties and early nineties, there were large pockets of Japanese families here to support the automotive industry, and we lived in a pocket like that, so our house was always run the Japanese way, according to the culture. There was no duality. The worldview was according to the older Japanese culture and then plus atheism, which my husband was clearly atheist, I would figure out over time. That he just didn’t like any spirituality at all. So that was our worldview in our home, Japanese culture plus older Japanese culture plus atheism, basically, and I came to feel that way, that there was no God. What did you think, in terms of what you had around you… Granted you lived in a culturally saturated Japanese environment, and your life and your lifestyle at that point was probably really engrossed in that, and you didn’t believe in God, and that was a perfectly obviously acceptable point of view within your family and your surrounding culture. I wonder, did you ever give a thought to God, even as an adult? What did you think religious belief was? Was it a construction? Was it something that was just culturally constructed for people to gather, like the Mormons? Yeah. I think that that Mormon start kind of had an effect there, too, whereby I thought, “Okay, the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith, those stories are just not true,” and that’s kind of modeled after the Bible in a way, and the Christian culture, so I thought probably that’s also not true, and it seemed like a crutch as well, so I was pretty ingrained in my atheism by the time… The marriage lasted 14 years, well two years engagement and then 12 years together, so… yeah. By the time I left, I was a full-blown atheist, and on top of that, I had studied existential philosophy near the end of my marriage, and although Christian philosophers come into play there, like Anselm, Augustine, and Kierkegaard, their cases were kind of downplayed. Every time we would get to those particular areas of study, they seemed to be downplayed, and there were so many dominant atheists in the mix in existentialism. So it kind of further backed what I had come to believe. So you became convinced, more than ever, that there really was not God. That it was just probably a construction of sorts, a social construction.  Yes. And if I could mention how it felt to me. Yes.  What it felt like was I was living in kind of a challenging household culturally and belief wise and with the guilt, shame, and all that, and the rejection, so what it felt like to me, by the time I graduated with my degree in philosophy, was that I lived in a box, this cultural box, and below me was like a false floor, like it was an un up-ended cardboard box, and I was going to fall through, and there was nothing but a black hole abyss under me. And then it also felt like… I thought there should be something above or some hope, some sky, some daylight, and I couldn’t sense that, either, so that kind of feeling caused me to lose a lot. It caused me to lose my… I left the marriage abruptly. I kind of lost my way in my mind, and I lost my children. And so it was tough. That sounds devastating, devastating. I suppose that, as a thinker… If you are studying philosophy, you think about things critically and existentially, and of course, the endpoint of a nihilistic worldview can be very despairing. There is not much in the way of hope and life and light there, according to those who are proponents of that, those philosophers. And so it sounds like you really hit an endpoint or a point of, again, existential angst because of the logical endpoint of your views.  Yeah. Ideas do have consequences. They don’t just live in your mind. They actually affect your life, and I would imagine that could be very devastating, especially in the fact that you’re losing your marriage and your children and you’re losing your own way. So it sounds like the bottom had dropped out for you, and you found yourself in a very dark place, a despairing place. So walk us on from there. What happened during that time period? Or what brought you out of that?    So you just kind of took some steps forward. All the while still embracing an atheistic worldview? Or naturalistic or materialistic worldview, as someone would be more prone to say.  Yes. That’s right. So my husband was, I said, American, and normal meat and potatoes guy, outdoors-man, and he told me he was Christian, and then I asked him why, because now I’d had a husband who told me he was Buddhist and found out he wasn’t Buddhist. I said, “Okay, so you’re a Christian. What does that mean?” He had no idea. He just said, “Oh, I just believe. I was baptized.” So okay, well, then, I guess I’ll just stay with what I have, but I suppose during my move to this small town, of course now I was seeing more churches. They were popping up into my purview. My coworkers were all American now. So I got this sense, and I think it was a pretty Christian town actually, and I got the sense that Americans were really nice and tolerant and forgiving, and that wasn’t the version of the Japanese culture I got. I got the older version. So I was feeling pretty good about that, and they were probably having an influence on me. The catalyst for my change, I think, was Sally. This woman whom I met over the phone accidentally. That’s quite a story on its own. Yes. That begs some curiosity. So an accidental meeting on the phone. You met a woman named Sally. I presume she was a Christian?  Yes. That’s right. Just like I was finding most of the people around me were Christian, or a good portion. So Sally was from another state altogether. She was from California, and I’m in Michigan. So we met accidentally. She was an older woman, and she witnessed to me. We became pals by phone and letter. I didn’t really go for anything she said, but shortly after I met her, a really dark secret came to light, and Sally was there for me. So I guess that meant a lot. Obviously, you had developed a relationship, a friendship with this woman who seemed to have a faith in God, in Christianity, and it sounds like she cared for you at a time when you actually really needed it. And that opened you? Did that soften you to the things that she was saying about God?  No. No. Okay.  No, it didn’t. So this dark secret was really, really not good at all, and it involved my daughter. She never… I had two children. My son I regained custody of, but my daughter never came back. She was so broken from my leaving and from my breakdown that she wouldn’t come back to me or spend time with me. So this dark secret was revealed by her, and it really turned my world upside down. And my friend Sally sent me a Bible right after she heard about it, and inside the Bible, it had this note, this sticky note which is still there to this day. It says, “This book will contain all the help you need.” And it contained scripture. I paid no attention to it. Two more years would pass. I’d lose touch with Sally, because she ended up in a nursing home, and she had no relatives whatsoever, so I lost track of her. But between the Christians I lived around and Sally and this burden now of this guilt over my daughter’s situation… Well, I saw a church one day that had a sign that said, “Got Jesus?” or something to that effect and had a class. It mentioned a class. I went online, signed up for it, and that was Alpha. My goal was to disprove the faith, so that I could get Sally and the other voices, whatever they were, out of my mind and then maybe I might try Buddhism again. I might try to understand that better because I never got a chance with that. So you walked into a church. You had had some experience with church. It was just the Mormon church. What was your experience when you first walked into a Christian church and opened the Bible for the first time?  Well, the people were all really nice. And the Alpha presentation was tolerable, understandable, kind of nice sounding, and so I stuck with it until… I almost dropped out at about the 11th or 12th week, though. There was a lesson on forgiveness, and having been in a Japanese culture for so long, I just had this sense that I have to carry the weight of the things I do wrong on my back all the time. It’s kind of like sackcloth and ashes or something. I have to do this. So I didn’t like that. I told them I didn’t like it. I thought it was a ridiculous idea that Christ would bear that, and then a member of the group, the church, gave me The Case for Christ book, and I read it, devoured it, and came out thinking, “This is probably true,” and kind of, “Now what?” So the Alpha course is really presenting an overview of the Bible and the story of God. Who is God? Who are we in our humanity? Obviously, they talked about the need for forgiveness and how we carry some sin, and you wanted to hold onto the burden of your own guilt, and the gospel, or the good news, is that Jesus wants to carry your burden of sin for you, so that you can receive forgiveness for what he did on the cross, rather than what you’ve done to try to remedy your own guilt or sin. But that was too tough to take for you.  Yes. So it just didn’t make sense. So you left there, but then you found intellectual confirmation or something that was satisfying for you to believe that it’s true, but there’s a real difference between believing a person came in history and did something on your behalf and actually accepting it personally, and it sounds like there was a great divide there for you.  Well, it took me a couple of weeks to think, “Now, what do I do?” Because it was, I guess, that offense. The offense of the cross. Am I going to be able to accept that? And so a couple of weeks later, I was at a funeral, my husband’s uncle, whom I didn’t know very well, but I found myself sobbing inside during the whole thing, like something deeply touched me in a way that I can’t even explain today. But when we left, I turned to my husband and I said, “I think I’m Christian,” and I began… At the funeral party, I remember witnessing to other people. “I think I just turned Christian at your father’s funeral.” And they were glad for that because he was a Christian man, so that was kind of interesting. Yeah. So I guess the pieces came together. You were able to see your own need and accept His gift for you of salvation.  Yes and no. Okay.  So that’s kind of a bump in the road that I came to, still. I thought… So here we are. My husband and I start going to church. I get baptized in Lake Michigan. Life is better. I feel a little relief. I could sleep better. But the bump in the road is that I still retained, unwittingly, a lot of control. That I had to fix things. I had to make things better. Constant. And then, this particularly became an issue when, about five years after I became a Christian in 2010, so it was about 2016, my daughter, who had been back in my life for then about nine years, abruptly left, estranged me. There were a lot of reasons. I hadn’t handled her brokenness well enough, I felt, and she felt that way. So there was still a harshness. I didn’t say this, but there was a harshness to me from being in that culture, a lot of rough edges, and when I accepted Christ at that funeral, my image is the Grinch, like the heart, the little heart that’s in the cage, like the heart’s growing and busting out. So some of those edges smoothed, but it was probably too late, and I still did not give all of my guilt to God. And I realized that… So she was gone. My husband and I moved up here to our second home here in the Upper Peninsula, where there’s a lot of nature, and there was more time. I didn’t work full time then. And I began to be outside a lot, just walked miles. I walked 10, 13 miles a day, just talking it out with God, and eventually would get so much insight and vision that, while I believed, the fact that I wouldn’t give over my children, and I still idolized my children so much, and I wouldn’t give up the control I needed to keep all the balls in the air and everything right, that that was showing I didn’t trust the gift. I didn’t trust God. And so my belief was too shallow. It was almost… I envisioned like Abraham and Isaac, like I had to say, “No matter what, I believe, and I trust you with these most precious things to me.” So that was the bump in the road that ended up deepening my faith. And that allowed the guilt to almost be completely gone, and then it allowed me to feel joyful and do what I’m doing today. So that’s where I’m at with that. Yeah. It’s such an oxymoron, isn’t it? The more we surrender and the more that we give, the more joy that we feel, and that’s certainly the case with God and our humanity. We want to retain control. It’s just something that we have to lay down almost daily, almost moment by moment. It is a constant struggle, and it sounds like you had a real, real deep challenge with that, and I’m glad to hear that you’ve learned, in a sense, the joy but the difficulty of surrender. I’m curious—Stacy, you said that you have come to a place where you are today which is a lot more firm in your faith and your life and the life of your mind coalesce more, and you mentioned at the beginning that you actually have a place, a house of ministry where you talk about philosophy. Now I’m curious because, at the beginning, you were really invested and believed in the existential philosophers, and you felt the despair of nihilism, but there were some philosophers that were put off to the side, you had exposure to, but you really, at that point in your life, had not embraced. I’m curious, then. After you became a Christ follower, you believed in God and Christ and a different worldview altogether, did those philosophers resurface in your life? And how was philosophy really re-framed in your mind in terms of how you see truth and reality and how it applies to your life, and then what you’re doing now with it to help others understand really philosophies talking about the big questions that we all ask about life. Talk with me about how you were able to put those pieces together.  I’ll try to summarize that. That’s kind of a big one. So it’ll be almost two years ago now, a year and a half, I started the Colson Fellowship Program. I felt a need to study more. I hadn’t had so much time when I was working full time, and I felt the need to study my faith more and go deeper with it, so at the same time, I wanted to be better at defending the faith for my children. My son still communicates with me, and he’s not a believer, and he has a lot of nihilistic thinking. Both of my children suffered quite a bit. So it was important to me to study apologetics. I felt such, as a young person, such a need for meaning in my life, and Kierkegaard has the stages along life’s way that show a human being’s kind of progression from what they call a mass-man to a knight of faith. There’s this over-arching paradigm. And so I used that to identify people that I encounter, I guess. So here in the forest, there are all kinds of people, just like there are in the cities or anywhere else. There’s believers. There’s marginal believers. There’s spiritual but not religious. There’s transcendental worldview folks. There’s atheists. We have them all right here in the forest. We have a microcosm of what’s everywhere. So I used Kierkegaard’s system, these stages upon life’s way, to understand where they are with the meaning of life and where their worldview, along with kind of a worldview survey that I have—I run that through my mind technically. I typically don’t ask them to take it, but they may, and I kind of identify where they are. But this is a lot of relationship building. This isn’t like I bring somebody in and I’m like a spiritual counselor. This is relationship building with people. That’s where philosophy’s a little more relaxed, I think, as a term. They don’t come in expecting I’m going to hit them over the head with my Christianity or my worldview. It’s very open and very soft entry. I call it pre evangelism. But not only do I use Kierkegaard’s philosophy in what I do, but I also use C.S. Lewis. So in order to get to the truth, it feels like the good and the beautiful, which I love G.K. Chesterton for his take on beauty, and I use a lot of his stuff as well. So the good and the beautiful lead one to the truth, I believe. That’s easy to show when you’re up here in such a beautiful place. So I kind of use all of that to bring people to the truth which they can base their meaning of life on and gain fidelity of belief. No. It really sounds intriguing, and I imagine you foster a great deal of very deep and meaningful discussion, very insightful discussion, and how wonderful that you lead people towards self-introspection, towards introspection of their own views, but also views about reality and leading them to a place of being able to see, perhaps for the first time, what really is good and beautiful, and ultimately true. So it sounds like a really wonderful and very unique work, and it’s intriguing, and I know that you have actually a website, don’t you? Philosophyintheforest.com?  I do. Yes. And so anyone who’s interested in seeing more of Stacy’s work can certainly go online and take a look. So Stacy, as a former atheist—for years, you were an atheist. How old were you when you became a Christian, by the way?  Well, I became Mormon, if that counts. Mormon was 12, but Christian was… I think I was 46? 46. Yeah. So you lived a good long time really looking at the world through atheist eyes.  Yes. And I wonder if those who are skeptics or who are actually looking at the big questions, maybe even struggling in their own sense of nihilism, I wondered how you would advise a skeptic, who might be listening today.  Oh, the skeptic. I would say to the skeptic that—and this is Kierkegaardian of me, I suppose, but the most important thing for the existing individual is to find the meaning of life, the reason for which we should live and die. And without that, we’re living precariously. We can’t know the absolute truth. We can reason our way close to an approximated truth, but we cannot know the absolute this side of eternity. Therefore, the individual needs to get as close as possible, and in order to do that, it takes investigation. It takes thoughtful investigation. But also it takes taking a step back and understanding what the higher truths are of this world. You can find them, those things which are good that we know are ultimate goods. And those things which are clearly beautiful. And build upon that to get to as close to the truth as possible. And then, from there, you need to think about, “Is there a litmus test for this or that view that I’m looking at? That I’m thinking will hold up this goodness and beauty?” Look at the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and find out whether it’s true or not. And I would challenge them to do that in an open-minded way, and if they find that it’s true, then they need to go with that. That’s what I say to the skeptic. You’ve got to get rid of your bias. You’ve got to be open minded and investigate, and The Case for Christ book is a good book for that part of it. Mere Christianity is good for talking about the good. And I love G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy for the nature and the beauty and the joy that that brings us. So that’s what I recommend for the skeptic. Yeah, I like what you’re saying there. There’s something called abductive reasoning, where we reason to the best explanation for reality. It may not be certainty, but we look at everything holistically, and we look at a cumulative case for what we see and experience, and it leads us to truth, really. Like you say, we all have certain biases, but we try the best we can to look at things in a neutral point of view or through a neutral lens. Again, that’s not absolutely possible, but we do the best we can to look and find actually the person who is truth, and like you say, it stands and falls really on the person of Christ. So that big question is, “Who do you say that I am?” He asks. He asks that of all of us.  So in terms of your advice to Christians who might be listening, what would you say to Christians in terms of how they would engage someone who’s skeptical?  Yes. Very important. I’m glad you asked that question. Because it’s a struggle out there. A lot of Christians struggle to do that, to share the gospel, and I’ve found that, number one, I have to be approachable, and before I just had all these rough edges and stuff, even when I first became Christian. So the joy that I found by giving the control over to God more and more and more, that relief is so incredible, and that gives me joy, which makes me approachable. So be approachable. Be joyful, really joyful. I don’t mean just say, I’m going to be happy today. It’s different. You’ll know if you don’t know now. And second, I would say be a listener. Make relationships. Both my husband and I have a lot of relationships in our neighborhood, and our neighborhood is big in terms of miles because there’s very few people, so you live five miles away from somebody, you know who they are. So we make a lot of relationships, and I think, in our minds, we have a little gauge—I wouldn’t tell them this exactly, but where they are with their worldview, if they have a worldview—well, everybody does to a degree, but how strong is their worldview? How embedded in that? How knowledgeable are they about it? And kind of gauge that through relationship. And then, third, I would say find an opening to bring in the good and the beautiful, and for that, I recommended a couple of books. Mere Christianity and Orthodoxy as good reads. Sometimes difficult but really helpful. So find that opening, because today people really want the good, and they’re very skeptical of you saying you have the truth. Naturally. So the good and the beautiful are really keys. And keep encouraging them and telling them that our meaning in life really is to face that difficult topic, that the meaning of life is very important for them to grasp, so that they can have a firm foundation, like I have. So that’s what I’d tell them. Yeah, that’s very good, and if I could just add one more question onto that, just a natural outflow of what you’re telling us as Christians and the importance of meaning, and I think meaning is really on the surface of culture these days. People are searching for meaning. So, in your life, if someone said, “Well, how is your life meaningful?” or, “What is the meaning that drives you in your life?” “Have you found that source of meaning that moves you every day?” How would you define meaning or your quest for meaning or the manifestation of meaning in your life?  My meaning isn’t based on any man-made culture. It’s not based on anything man-made or circumstance. My meaning is based on a God Who loves me, Who delights in me. He finds me delightful, and when I’m joyful, He finds me really delightful. He rescued me because He delighted in me. That’s the meaning of my life, is I know my God wanted me. And it makes sense. He’s an artist. Obviously, he’s an artist. He wants all kinds of crazy people, really. He wants all kinds. So I’ve been through all of this, and I have a meaning. All of this has had a meaning. As tragic as some of it has been, but it has a meaning and a purpose. And I’m there to delight my Lord as much as possible, as much as humanly possible. Yes. To know and be known by God. And to make Him known- Yes. … is what you’re saying that you have found. You’ve been found by the Creator of the universe. But I would imagine that that really fuels your life. It sounds like it does.  It does! It drives me hard. Because I want to help so many people, and I find my time is very taken up by that relationship building piece now, and… yeah. It’s unbelievable, really. Yeah. So you want others to find the joy and the peace and the meaning that you have found.  Yes. This is a beautiful story! It is good, and it is beautiful. And it’s true!  It is. And your story points to all of those things, Stacy. So I just want to thank you for coming on and really revealing some very deep things about yourself, some very hard things, but pointing us all to really think, as a philosopher would, to make us think about our own lives and how we view those big and deep questions. And I hope that everyone who’s listening to this will be more thoughtful and intentional about pursuing those big questions and actually pursuing the person of Christ, where all of that lies.  So thank you so much, Stacy, for coming on today.  Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Stacy’s journey from atheism to God and Christianity. You can find out more about her group, Philosophy in the Forest, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow 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.   Stacy’s Books: “The Mind Hike: Finding Meaning Through Truth-Seeking” https://amzn.to/3h8rAJo “The Six-Foot Bonsai: A Soul Lost in the Land of the Rising Sun” https://amzn.to/3vcX6xZ     For more stories of atheist conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former atheist Guillaume Bignon set out on a quest to disprove Christianity and was surprised by what he found. Guillaume’s Book: Confessions of a French Atheist: How God Hijacked My Quest to Disprove the Christian Faith Guillaume’s Twitter: @theoloGUI Website featuring Guillaume’s work: https://www.associationaxiome.com To hear more stories about former skeptics and atheists who became Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who is a former atheist who, against all odds, became a Christian. Our beliefs, religious or not, are shaped within a context of place and people and events. We tend to believe the ideas of the people we like, that fit in with how people around us view the world. Most beliefs are not tested but rather assumed. Caught, not taught. And then shaped to fit into our individual understanding and experience of the world. According to many in Western culture, belief in God has nothing to do with their lives. More than that, to believe in God is not only irrelevant but embarrassing. It’s social or intellectual suicide. The scientifically minded don’t believe in God, in the supernatural, in the superstitious. Besides all of that, it constrains your lifestyle. For the happy atheist, there’s no felt need or desire for God. They’re just fine navigating life on their own. This begs the question: For someone like that, what would change their mind? Why switch course and change and turn in God’s direction? For the former atheist in our story today, life could not be going any better. As a sophisticated thinker, a successful businessman, an esteemed athlete and musician, Guillaume was also an avowed atheist. But he unexpectedly came to believe that God was not only deeply relevant to his life but was the source and center of life itself. In fact, he now holds a doctorate in theological philosophy, discussing issues of reality and of God. How in the world did that happen? I hope you’ll come along with me today to listen and to find out. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Guillaume. It’s so great to have you with me today! Thanks for having me, Jana. It’s a pleasure. Wonderful. Why don’t you give us a sense of who you are right now, where you live, a little bit about your life before we go back into your story? Yes. So as my accent really betrays, I am French, but I do live in the United States now. That was kind of part of my story of how I went from France to the US, but yes, I grew up in France, near Paris. Today, I am the US. I have lived for many years in New York, or in the New York area, and I have just now recently moved to Virginia with my wife and five young children, so the five young children explain the move away from New York. We are in a little bit more of a peaceful area in Virginia. I am an engineering manager. I work in information technology, and in my spare time, I am a philosopher and apologist, so I engage in topics around the Christian faith, philosophical theology, and all sorts of related matters. It sounds like you’ve got a very, very full life. For sure. Five children! My hat’s off to you, though. What a blessing that must be! But a busy life, no doubt. So you were telling me, through that self-introduction, that you grew up around the Paris area in France, and I want for you to take us back there to your childhood. Give us a sense of what that looked like growing up. Was there any sense of religious belief in that culture and in the culture of your home and even in your own life? Yes. So as a young child, I grew up in France near Paris, in the suburbs, in a very loving family. I have an older brother and a younger sister, and the three of us had a wonderful family with our parents, and as far as religious beliefs are concerned, we are at least nominally Roman Catholic. I mean I didn’t really get very invested personally in this. It was more of an inconvenience than anything else, something that we just did, maybe out of tradition and maybe a little bit of superstition, but not really a very strong life conviction, at least not for us children. So that was kind of my environment. But that’s not something that lasted for very long because, when we grew up and were given a bit more freedom, my parents didn’t force us to continue attending church, and we very soon decided that this was not really for us, and so we were able to—I mean I say we because my brother went a couple of years before me, but I followed along, and we simply stopped going to church, and at least my life as an atheist at that point didn’t really differ much from what I had always believed or done. It just that I no longer had to go to church on Sunday morning, so that was just an initial inoculation to religion and then the departure and not much of a life radical change as a result. You fairly quickly said that you just moved into atheism, like it was a default position. And it sounds like you did that as a teenager, I presume, and I wondered: Was that just a presumption that you made? Was there any intellectual thought or investigation towards a naturalistic point of view? How did that happen? It happened fairly naturally. Again, in France, I think this is a little bit in the air we breathe. It seems like a default position indeed, not believing in religion, and we just… God is not really an entity. It’s not even a question. So it’s not a topic that we spend too much time thinking about. And so, no. That was just, “Okay. If we are done with religion, then I guess let’s live without God, and this is fine.” And there wasn’t all that many other alternatives or options. I wasn’t considering another religion, and so there was just default, and this is how I figured I would live my life. So did you give naturalism much thought in terms of its implications for your life? Or were you just fine without God, and that was pretty much all you thought about it? No. I mean I certainly started to believe there was nothing beyond the natural world. Whether there were any important philosophical consequences from that belief is not something that I really asked myself at that time. I simply figured that I didn’t need God. I didn’t need Him to be happy and to have a good, full life, and so I simply ceased going to church, and I focused on my own projects and trying to live a happy life, and I sought for happiness in a number of avenues that seemed fun and right to me. I was playing volleyball at that time. I was very engaged in sports, so I was having fun and became good after late puberty and ended up growing pretty fast and being big and jumping high, so I ended up having fun playing volleyball, and I ended up playing in the national level, so traveling the country on the weekends to play the games, trying to have fun and just seek for happiness in that area. I was also playing music. I played the piano when I was little and then got into playing the keyboard and started to play in a band and writing my own music, playing in concerts, so I was trying to live the dream of being a rock star in my own world. And I studied math, physics, and engineering, and so I sought to have a solid job and a good income, and I ended up graduating from engineering school and then starting to work as a computer engineer in the financial industry. So I figured this was stability and income, and I had volleyball and music to have a range of enjoyments of this life to seek my own happiness. So it sounds like you really had life by the tail. It sounds like, from almost every perspective, that you were successful. You were athletic. You were a musician. You were brilliant. You studied and achieved at a level, and that you were working. So it causes one to pause and say, “Wow! If life is going so well, and I’m sitting with you talking about God and your belief in God, how in the world did that happen?” What was the catalyst that turned your head or turned your mind or your heart to become open towards even the possibility of God? Yeah. Well, besides the volleyball and music, as far as avenues to seek my own fulfillment and happiness, for a young atheist in France of my age, there was one other goal that I very much was running after, and it was women. And so I was very much seeking feminine conquests and trying to have enough material to satisfy the banter of the locker room in the volleyball games, and so I had a pretty rough history of relationships and treating women very much poorly. A lot of cheating and a lot of… just very… lying and deception and simply self-enjoyment and fulfillment. And that’s another area that was instrumental in me being converted by Christianity again because it happened very fortuitously, while on vacation, I was in the Caribbean with my brother. We were visiting my uncle. And there was a very serendipitous meeting, on a day where we were on the distant beach, where we didn’t have a car to come back home, and somehow we decided to hitchhike our way back home, and after a few seconds of hitchhiking, there was a small car that stopped with two American women in it. One was from New York. The other one was from Miami. They were both very attractive. One of them was a former model, and the car that stopped didn’t stop to pick us up. They stopped to ask for directions. They were lost on their way from the airport to their hotel, but as it so happened their hotel was right next door to the house that we were staying at, so when they told us that, we said, “Well, that’s great! We’ll tell you where it is if you’ll pick us up and drive us there,” and they hesitated for a second and then eventually we got in. And we started talking, and I immediately went into seduction mode and trying to connect and trying to see them again, and the French accent kicked in, and the seduction worked out decently, because they gave us their room number again and made plans to see us again while on the island. And so we did go and see them and showed them a good time on the island, and on the day where we were on the beach, I pretty much made the move, and I was now in a relationship with one of them. And I was fairly hopeful that this would be a bit more serious than just an island romance because it was a very romantic situation. She was really exceptional. And so I… Yeah. Well, I was hopeful it would lead to something more. The problem is that, in conversation with her on the beach, I found out a couple of pretty devastating news. One was that she claimed to believe that God exists. She said she was a Christian. And to me at that point that was clearly an intellectual suicide. I did not have any respect anymore for belief in God. And the other piece that she mentioned was that, alongside her belief in Christianity, that included a belief in abstinence before marriage, and that was really not what I wanted, and so those two things were extremely problematic at the time. So that was how I got converted by Christianity, by having to say, “If I want this to work with her, I’m going to have to disabuse her of her beliefs about religion first and then about the sexual ethics that come with it, as a very important piece for us to be together.” And so I still… With anybody else, those beliefs would have made me run away with no questions asked. I bet. But she was special enough that, when I went back to Paris, and she flew back to New York, I decided to try to work it out as a long-distance relationship and that her religious beliefs would have to take care of themselves, and that we would work it out. Wow. So you were distanced not only geographically, you were across the world, but you had quite a distance in your beliefs. So that, I would imagine, would cause a lot of problems, but for whatever reason, it opened the door to investigate a little bit more closely what belief in God meant. So what did that look like? Take us on from there. Sure. So I went back to France, and here I was in this extremely problematic long-distance relationship, and I thought if I’m going to have to convince her to stop religion and to be with me and happy, I would have at least to explain to her, to give her some good reasons, right? To use my common sense and explain to her why this is silly to believe in God, but I realized if I was going to refute her beliefs, I needed to at least understand what she even believed, and I realized I had very little knowledge of what Christianity was even about, so I did pick up a Bible that was left in my closet and dusted it off like Aladdin’s lamp, and I started to look at it and see if I could glean some of the very distant memories I had of Christianity, but I very quickly realized that I really had no knowledge at all, and it was something that we would need to figure out together because it was foreign to me. So I figured, “We’ll discuss those things when we see each other,” and that’s something that we organized fairly quickly after the vacation. We did make plans for her to come visit in France, and so she came, and I got to see that religion was going to be clearly the center of the problem, that it was a very real thing for her. A couple of things really concerned me: One is that apparently her pastor was the one who was dropping her off at the airport and picking her up, and to me, that rang some sort of alarm bells, like, “Oh, what is going on with the pastor there? Is this some sort of a cult like I’ve seen in documentaries?” And the other is that she apparently had been given the address of a church in Paris to visit, and to me, that seemed completely unnecessary. Could she not skip a few Sundays of not going to church while she’s with me in France? So it was problematic. The fact that she had somehow the need to get the address of a church in Paris was concerning to me. So she came to Paris, and this is where we started to talk a little bit about our potential future, and I asked her if her religion could be… I was trying to take it slowly and to ask her, before I tried to convince her to stop religion altogether, I figured, “Well, I’ll at least start with a degree of openness,” and I said, “Well, if I never change my mind, would you be okay to be married with an atheist?” I thought it would be a bit of a longer conversation, but she very casually almost said, “Oh, no! Absolutely not. That wouldn’t work out.” And I was shocked. Like what kind of intolerant belief that here I was almost ready to make a concession that she could be a religious person and she was not ready for me to be an atheist. So I said, “Well, this is nonsense. That means it’s not going to work,” and it was kind of a tense evening. And then she was really upset that I was this close minded, and she said, “Well, why won’t you even hear any of what I have to say? Some of my reasons. Why are you so closed minded?” And I realized I was really not open to that, and so that launched me into a little bit more of a thinking about, “Okay, let me hear the other side. Let me understand what you’re believing and then think about it for myself, so that I can actually see what we’re dealing with and I can refute it on solid grounds,” but not just on a whim or ignorant of what she actually believed. That’s kind of the turning point there in terms of my getting ready to investigate those things seriously. So when you were investigating, then, or when you started the process, it sounds like you wanted to take down her beliefs. I’m curious, even just getting started with the investigation, you tried to move to a little bit more openness to respect her and her beliefs and try to figure those out. Would you see it as a movement towards disproving, rather than true investigation? In terms of a neutral perspective. I know none of us are neutral. We all have biases, but how would you judge your own motives and perspective at that time? Yeah. I mean, I think it was a progressive change in terms of openness. I certainly started as a very negative project because I just wanted to remove that barrier between unsuccessful, and I couldn’t stand the idea of religion. I felt I had wasted enough time in my childhood with this nonsense, and I had no intention of really giving much more time to that activity. So I was certainly not willing, but I was also trying to be fair to whatever it is that she believed, so that I could give it a fair hearing and actually use my common sense to refute it, but at least refute something accurately. And then, at the same time, there was also a part inside of me that thought, “Look, if I’m going to take this seriously, if I’m going to investigate and actually think about it somewhat objectively, then I need to force myself to be a bit open,” and I also didn’t want any of my desires to influence this reflection one way or the other, because yes, I didn’t want religion at all, and so that could force me to just refute it even if I don’t have a good case against it, but there was also the real possibility that, if she was not open to changing her mind, that maybe I could be motivated because of her to now, all of a sudden, say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. That’s true,” but that’s going to be just to make it work with her. And it was very clear to me that neither of those scenarios was positive, was desirable. If I were to believe all these beliefs, it would have to be based on the truth, not be based on my desires to be with her or not. So there was kind of that approach to objectivity, trying to force myself to be somewhat neutral, even though I was aware there were influences on both sides that would be irrelevant and that needed to be kept outside of my reasoning. So you were, as best you could, pursuing truth as the most important thing? I think yes, as best I could. None of us is fully objective, but I think this was a concern, to think about this properly and figure it out. Yeah, yeah. So walk us through that. How did you start to begin this process? Yes. So the first thing I did is that I actually opened that Bible and started to read the New Testament for myself to get an idea, finally, as a young adult of what it actually says. Because I had memories of my childhood, time spent in the church pews, bored every Sunday morning, and when I took the Bible, I expected to find in there some of the boring platitudes that I remembered from my childhood. And here, it was a very different experience, reading the New Testament, reading the gospels for myself, this description of the life and ministry of Jesus. The Person of Jesus, when I started reading about Him as a young adult, was very captivating. I thought I was confronted with a very compelling character, a very smart teacher, a master with words who navigated masterfully through conversations, who was constantly winning the exchanges when people came to try to entrap Him and to catch Him in his words, and He would always masterfully navigate those conversations. He was teaching with a sense of authority, saying that the kingdom of God had come in His ministry and that he was the Son of God. He claimed all sorts of big things and was just a very compelling character. So it tasted nothing like I remembered from my childhood, and it made me a little bit uncomfortable. I wasn’t too sure what to make with that Jesus. And who was also morally impressive, that he was able to humble Himself and wash the feet of His disciples and just present a compelling picture, so I was very captivated by the person of Jesus I was reading in the New Testament. Yeah, I think it’s often surprising. Someone has an idea of who they think Jesus is from some cultural reference or from a picture or a painting they saw as a child or whatever, and then once they started reading themselves, the scripture, what they find is something so much more robust or impressive or intelligent or stronger than they had thought in their own mind, and it sounds like you were very surprised and, like you say, captivated by the person of Jesus. Yep. So that was one piece here in my investigation, to be confronted with the real Jesus of the New Testament and to find Him really compelling. Another piece is that I tried to be somewhat open and did something that, in retrospect, was probably mistake number one, or mistake number two, but I thought, “Look, if any of this is true and I’m going to give it a fair hearing, then that means that there’s a God who would be looking at me doing this right now and would probably be interested in the fact that I’m looking into it,” so I started to pray as an unbeliever, just somewhat… I mean I saw this as an experiment. I was a scientist, and I was an engineer, so I figured, “Let me do the experiment, and say, ‘Okay, I don’t believe there’s a God, but if there is one, go ahead and reveal Yourself to me. I’m open.'” And so that was kind of the next move, unbelieving prayer, which, in retrospect, as a Christian now, I very much say, “Well, this was clearly not a lost prayer,” but it’s just a move that I did, and that’s just about all I had for that investigation just on the moment. I couldn’t really end up in church even if I wanted to because, at that time, I was playing volleyball in the national league, and every weekend, I was traveling around the country to play the games, and it’s just that, shortly after I prayed that unbelieving prayer, there’s something that happened out of the blue is that I developed an injury on my right shoulder. And it’s not something that came from an accident or anything very explainable, just out of the blue it started to hurt. The shoulder would be inflamed, and in ten, fifteen minutes after the beginning of each practice, I just couldn’t spike anymore, and I was just unable to play, and the doctor really couldn’t see what was going on. The physical therapist tried to help, and that didn’t really do it. And they were basically saying, “Look, we don’t really know, but you’re going to need to rest that shoulder, so you need to stop volleyball for a few weeks, and we’ll reconvene.” And so, against my will, I was now off of volleyball courts for a number of weeks, and so I figured, since I’ve been reflecting on this Christianity thing and trying to figure out what she was about, what I did is I went on my computer, and I recollected the address of the church that she had been given when she visited me. She had opened it on my computer, so I was able to go and get the address again without telling her, and I figured, “I’m going to go and see what those Christians do when they get together, just to get an idea,” and so I picked up that address, and I drove to that church in Paris, and once again, it was shortly after I got my own apartment, thankfully, because clearly if I had still been with my family, I could never have justified my going to church, but now I was isolated, by myself, off of volleyball courts, and I had the address, so I went. And I drove to that church in Paris, and the way I would describe it is that I went there like I would go to the zoo, to see some weird, exotic animals I had heard of but never seen in real life. And so I walked into that church, and it was very awkward because I was constantly thinking that this was already an offense against my intellect to be even present in the building, and that if any of my family or friends could see me there I would die of shame. But nevertheless, I walked into the church and observed some of the differences between that church and the Catholic church of my childhood. But I was touched by some of the genuineness of the people. Again, all of this was very awkward and felt strange to me, but some of them were praying, and it really looked like they were actually talking to a God who they thought was there. It wasn’t rehearsed or recited prayers, like I was used to. And they genuinely believed that stuff. And so I sat down, and I just watched the service. The music was modern, and as a musician, I was interested in the talent of the musicians but clearly couldn’t sing the lyrics with their religious nature. And the sermon was an interesting piece. I don’t remember a word that the preacher said on that Sunday morning. Maybe I was just too focused on my feeling of being ashamed of being in the building and what would happen if anyone saw me there, but I don’t remember what he said. But the sermon ended, and I thought, “I’ve seen enough. I’ve got what I came to see, let me escape now so that I don’t have to introduce myself to anybody and don’t have to connect,” so I don’t make eye contact with anyone, and I just jump on my feet and walked to the back of the church to escape. And this is when I opened the door to leave, and I literally had one foot out the door, and there’s a big blast of chills that just started in my stomach and went up in my chest and grabbed me by the throat, and I was frozen on the doorstep. With goosebumps. And I heard myself thinking, “This is ridiculous. I have to figure it out.” And so I completely turned around. I closed the door, and I walked straight to the head pastor, and I introduced myself. And I said, “So you believe in God, huh?” “Well, yes.” And I said, “Well, how does that work?” and he offered that we should talk about it if I was willing to make an appointment with him. And so I did. And years later he told me that he didn’t really believe that I would actually come, but I said, “All right. Fine. I’ll be there, and I’ll come, and we’ll chat.” And this is how a long series of conversations started with this pastor in France. His name was Robert. He was American, but he had been a missionary in France for many years. And I showed up to his office on that day and started to unpack my questions. I told him about my situation, what I was looking into, and we started talking about Christianity. Were you letting your girlfriend know? You said you kind of went there without her knowledge for the first time, but were you communicating with her about what you were reading in the Bible? What you were experienced? What you experienced that day at the church? Yeah. A little bit of that. It seems fuzzy. I mean it’s many years ago, so I’m not super clear on the details of what transpired. After a while, I did tell her that I did go to that church and then there was this conversation, but somehow I kept things very separate in my mind. It was really all about my thinking and investigation of those things, and she was somewhat out of that. I started the conversation with that pastor, Robert, in France, and it started to be more about our exchange together than really anything that I would do with or without my girlfriend at the time. So it was really just an independent investigation, it sounds like, you and the pastor. Yeah. That’s how I recall it. Yeah. Yeah, so we started talking, and I asked some of my previous questions, and he would not necessarily engage in what we would call apologetics, and I don’t know that he offered really positive arguments in favor of Christianity, but he was explaining, at least within his own worldview, the coherence of his beliefs, and that was impressive enough already for me at the time, that there was somebody who was actually willing to answer questions and explain his beliefs about God. And he seemed to really believe it, I guess. There was no doubt. This was not a facade. He really believed this stuff. He gave me one little booklet that was very interesting of him. He gave me a little booklet that he had written with a number of questions and then the Bible references for me to go and find out the answer for myself. So that was kind of an introduction to some of his Christian beliefs, and I did this, so I took that little booklet of his and went home, started to open the Bible and go and get those answers and write them down, and then every answer led to more questions on my side, so I wrote all of my questions on those papers, and this would fuel the next conversation when I went to see him again and could ask those questions, which led to more questions, so it quickly turned into a pile of paper with lots of questions, and this is what drove our exchange. And through these conversations and my own reading of the Bible and my own thinking, there’s a number of areas, a number of topics, on which I came to simply realize I was mistaken and to quite significantly change my mind, and… yeah. So some of those topics were my view of the supernatural, miracles, and whether it was intellectual suicide to believe that there was something beyond the natural world. Another one was my view of science and the role that science needs to play in our beliefs and justifying our beliefs and our knowledge of the world. Another one was my view of sex and Christian ethics around relationships and marriage. And another one was my view of knowledge and what it takes to know something. And then my view of salvation. So that’s five areas in which I really had a significant shift, that’s supernatural, science, sex, knowledge, and salvation. Those are quite big areas. Especially for someone who was an atheist, an avowed atheist, all of your life. Especially, like you say, the very first one, just the reality of the supernatural. That’s a really tremendously big issue. Either the natural world is all that exists or there’s something more than the natural world. How did you come to believe or accept that there was something more than the natural world? Did it come through reading the Bible? Or was it more, like you say, apologetics-related things? What convinced you there? Yeah. So here, the shift wasn’t immediately that I believed that something beyond nature existed. My shift… I was starting from a bit farther down. My shift was to simply accept that one could believe that and not be stupid. That was a little bit of a shift, but that was something that I was confronted by Robert, that in front of me was this guy who was clearly educated, who was smart, who was not emotionally unstable, wasn’t trying to use religion to compensate for some weakness, and he genuinely believes that there’s a God and that Jesus was raised from the dead and that miracles are actually possible and happening. So the beginning of the shift here was to simply say, “Okay, what’s going on with that?” that somebody could not commit intellectual suicide but actually believe those things. So I was confronted by Robert’s existence, and then I also realized there’s actually lots of smart people who believe that there’s more to the world than just nature in motion. So it wasn’t that I embraced the supernatural just quite yet, but I placed it on the map by realizing some people can actually affirm it, and it’s not like I had a solid argument for why that couldn’t be, right? So I figured this was just a possibility and started to respect that a bit. So that was my shift on the supernatural at that point. The shift on science was simply realizing that I had somewhat assumed that science would be at the center of all this, and I was a scientist myself. I studied physics, engineering, science, and biology, and I figured science is how you know things about the world. And then I reflected and tried to see, “Well, what have I learned in all of my engineering studies of science? What do I know that actually conflicts with the existence of God?” And it was an important step because I hadn’t really sat down and actually given much thought as to what counts for or against God’s existence, and for the first time, I realized that, for all of my scientific pretensions, little of my scientific knowledge was even relevant to the question. Certainly none of what I had learned or knew about science was a refutation of the existence of God. So that shift on science simply said, “Well, probably this is probably not the most relevant consideration,” and I realized that there’s plenty of things that we know in life that are just not based on science. That’s just not how we know things. And I figured that maybe God’s existence and the truth of Christianity would be in that category of things that we can possibly know, but it’s not going to be based on science itself. And now today, as a philosopher, I realize that this is absolutely basic, right? The idea that science is the only way to know things is very sophomoric. It’s really a bad idea. And these tons of counter examples, and it’s even self-refuting. So that’s really not a good philosophical view, but that’s one that I came to surrender in my own thinking about those matters. So if I am working down through that list again of topics, the next one, I suppose, was sex and the Christian ethics around that. And here, that was a minefield because I was clearly bent on not accepting the idea that abstinence was a good idea before marriage. And here the progressive shift that happened is that Robert was able to paint a picture that was more attractive, that there was something genuine about his understanding, so he was able to defend the Christian view as one where God is designing marriage. He’s the Creator of the world, and He’s in a good position to tell us some of the good conditions for us to engage in sex. And surely I didn’t like that picture myself, and this is not what I was planning, but there was an internal consistency once again, and there was also some degree of appeal from a more traditional and more conservative view of relationships and sexuality. I myself had this long past and long history of terrible treatment of women and cheating and lies, and this was not good, and so there was a part of me that was ready to contemplate that maybe the more conservative ethic on that front would be actually refreshing. But not all the way to that Christian belief. So there was a bit of back and forth there. And one piece that he was very helpful at was that I was also concerned that the Christian view of relationships like that had also some intolerant aspect to it, which was, “You should not marry a non-Christian,” right? To me, that seemed intolerant. And that Robert was very helpful in clarifying. Look, there’s actually plenty of good wisdom in that. If belief in God and Christianity is very central, which it should be for a Christian, then this makes good sense to say that your spouse, who is going to be the most important person in your life on this planet, shares the most fundamental beliefs about life. Otherwise, your marriage just doesn’t stand a chance. So that, I understood, was no longer intolerant. It made good sense. And he was able to defuse that. Yeah. So your girlfriend’s statements about not being willing to marry an atheist, I guess, was making more sense to you at that point? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.  So you said also the issue of knowledge was something that you had to work out? Yeah. And so this was a bit later on, and this is a piece that was really a turning point there. When I started to realize that the Christian view was making much more sense than I had hoped it would and that I was starting to suspect this actually… I don’t really have much of a case against it. And I was starting to wonder, “What do I make of this Jesus character as well?” At least I never really bought the idea that Jesus was a fictional character. It seemed clear to me that He was a person steeped in history, that minimally He was this teacher in Palestine in the first century who gathered lots of people and clearly had an impact such that the world is still very much at least influenced by His teachings and lots of His followers. So I was really unclear, and I was starting to wonder what would happen if this would actually be true and if my life should have to confront a change, a radical change, in beliefs. And I continued to have those unbelieving prayers and trying to see, “Okay. Well, I’m starting to see that there’s room for Christianity to be true. I’m curious if God really is there, could He reveal this more powerfully to me, in ways that would really convince me, would make me certain.” Because if there’s one thing that I didn’t want to do it was I didn’t want to just believe, have blind faith. I really wanted to be quite confident that what I embraced or what I concluded would be the truth, and this is one piece where I realized my view of knowledge and the expectations that I had in terms of certainty were also misguided. So what I really hoped for was that I would have absolute certainty, that there would be really strong grounds for an irrefutable belief in God if that were where I landed, and I realized that this was a very unrealistic expectation, that there’s lots of things that we know in life that we don’t have absolute certainty for, but there’s one category of knowledge that’s very respectable and very important to us, and it’s simply testimony, that we could be knowing things simply on the basis that somebody else who knows it told us. And it sounds a bit silly, but there’s tons of very important things that we know like that. I know my name. I know my date of birth. I know what happened on the day I was born. I know lots of things, not because I have proof or certainty of any sort, simply because somebody who knew told me this was true. And so that was an important intellectual shift when I started to contemplate Christianity and it started to make sense, and I was starting to suspect this might actually be true and it would be a huge deal. I realized that my expectations in terms of knowledge were unreasonable, and I realized there’s lots of things that we know simply on the basis of a testimony, and I started to see the gospels that I was reading as pretty much satisfying that criteria, of testimony, realizing this is actually comparable to a testimony of people who were there, who said, “This is what we’ve seen. We’ve spent this time with this Jesus. Here’s what He said. Here’s what He’s done.” And obviously the story of His being crucified and His allegedly raising from the dead. So obviously there’s the supernatural aspect in there, and then there’s the question of whether or not that testimony is reliable, but I came to see that this was similar to the claim that somebody has seen something, they tell me, and now I know. So I came to appreciate the reliability of that testimony to come to the knowledge of what happened to Jesus, of who He was, and what He did, allegedly rose from the dead. And obviously, we don’t want this… You know, it shouldn’t be simplistic, like somebody says something, and now we just believe it, and we’re gullible because we just take everything. No. You don’t get knowledge just because somebody says it. It has to be a reliable source. And so that question is whether or not the gospels are reliable as a testimony to what Jesus said and did, and the important point here again, when we look at what I was considering at the time, is that I wasn’t aware of all the scholarly debates around the reliability of the scriptures like I am now, because it’s my interest, but at that time, I was still convinced that I didn’t need to know all of those objections in order to form a justified knowledge about what Jesus said and did. So at the time, this is pretty much where I landed. I saw the testimony of the gospels as reliable, as telling me what happened, and intellectually, it seemed like, yes, that made sense, and I could trust that this was the truth about what happened in history. So that was the last very strong intellectual shift where I changed my mind in terms of the truth of this happening. But that doesn’t make me a Christian quite yet, because there’s the final shift that needed to happen, and it’s the shift of heart more than the shift of mind. And that’s the part where I came to understand the message of salvation. And so this is another piece that happened concurrently to all of my reflections, is that, through all of this study and my prayers started to become like, “God, again, if You’re there, really show Yourself powerfully,” and I was hoping for God to just open the heavens and shine the light and say [CROSSTALK 49:01]. But what he did was very different, but it was very powerful, too, is that he reactivated my conscience, and it was very unpleasant because what happened is that I had come to commit some really nasty stuff. I had essentially cheated on my girlfriend multiple times and in aggravating circumstances, and so I’ll spare you the details, but basically I had done all of this stuff, and I had obviously covered it with lots of lies, and I was lying to myself as well, and in my experience of asking God to reveal Himself to me, He simply just took that and shoved it in my face, and I was just afflicted with guilt. I could only see what I had done, my own sins, and it was very crippling. And it’s in the midst of this pain that the message that I had been reading all along, the message that I had actually had a very hard time understanding intellectually, finally clicked. I had been reading, that Jesus died on the cross for us, but I hadn’t really made the connection. I couldn’t see, like, “What’s the connection between Jesus dying on the cross and me, my life as a Christian if I were to become one?” And it’s in that area of pain when my conscience was reactivated that I realized, “Yes. This is why Jesus had to die. Me. He paid the penalty for my sins. Those very ones here that I can’t stop seeing, that I’m crippled with guilt about,” and I realized this is now the good news that this text has been proclaiming, that I can repent of my sins and simply trust in Jesus, and because of His sacrifice on the cross, He can forgive me freely, and I would have eternal life freely on the basis of my faith in Him and not on the basis of my righteousness. And that message hit me like a ton of brick. And so this is really the shift that happened in the heart, as much as in the mind, where I was willing, and I said, “Yes. That’s the one. Okay. Lord, You’re real. This has happened. Take my life and save me,” and there was a very strong spiritual renewal. My guilt evaporated. I was literally born again, quite literally. It was a very significant change emotionally, spiritually about that. I felt like I had encountered the living God and that my sins, that had become very real to me, were now forgiven because of what Jesus had done. Wow! That’s quite something. It sounds like, although you began this search, obviously, to see if it was true, but you not only found that it was not only true but real and real, not only intellectually but real for your life, for your person, for your soul. And I can’t imagine the shift, the juxtaposition that you must have experienced. How long was this process? How long did this take you? It sounded like you were quite on an intentional journey. From the time that I met Robert on that infamous Sunday morning to the time that I actually embrace the good news, it was a number of months. It was probably less than six months. But yes, several months, and the final piece is that, when I finally was convicted and realized this was the real deal, it was just at the right time that I was planning to go, for the first time, to visit my girlfriend in New York. And so this was an extremely conflicting moment, because I felt like I had believed that this was the truth, but now I needed to confess my own sins to her. And I figured that… I was extremely conflicted because all the advice that I had been given was, “You don’t need to mention any of this. It’s done, so just be happy with her.” That was not the advice that Robert gave me, obviously, because I didn’t tell him any of this before I went to New York, but my friends had given me this advice, to simply not say anything, and inside of me, my conscience was very activated, and I thought, “There’s no way I can build a relationship with a lie,” so I was confused. I went there, and I discovered New York. We had a very intense week, and towards the end, I finally caved in, and I did confess all of my sins and figured, like, “This is going to break us up, and this is going to be over, but at least I will live in the light, and I will be able to walk according to my conscience.” So this was extremely painful. She took it very negatively, and that was just before I was leaving, so I flew back to Paris, and I thought we were done for. Well, I knew, except that when I walked out of the airport in Paris, there was a message on my phone that she still wanted to try and forgive me and to make it work. And so at that point started a period of me trying to make it work with her. And I had thought, “God has been using all of this to bring me to faith,” so I was ready to make the jump, and what I did is that I took steps to basically turn my life around. I left everything in France, and so I quit my volleyball team. I quit my band. I quit my job. I found a job in Wall Street because I was working in finance, so that worked out quite well. And then I moved to the US to be with her and to just have this new life. And so I was full of hope and emotions, and then I arrived, and then this is where the story takes another turn, which is that our relationship turned out to be really bad. We were not meant for each other at all, and it took me a number of months to accept that truth, but all of this was not for us to be together, and so we actually broke up after that. And this is the place where I was starting to wonder, “Well, okay, God. What are You up to? This is what I get when I turn my life around?” And so I was in New York with very few social connections and no volleyball team, no band, just my job, and all of my evenings and weekends were just free, and this is just about the time that I started to have to answer questions from my family and friends in France about my newfound faith, trying to convince them that I hadn’t lost my mind, so this is what started conversations where I started to engage intellectually and tell them, “Look, these are some of the reasons that I’ve come to believe,” and then I was curious and started to study and understand, “Oh, yeah, there’s other good reasons to believe this is true,” and so I shared those, and I enjoyed the exercise of sharing that, and the next thing you know, I was spending all of my evenings and all of my weekends just thinking and researching those things, watching debates and documentaries and reading books and following the footnotes and really enjoying this, and after a few months of doing this all the time, I figured, “If I’m going to be spending all of my time and all of my resources doing this, then I might as well get a degree out of it,” and so this is how I applied to seminary, and I, a few years later, graduated with a Masters in Biblical Literature with an emphasis on the New Testament, and then after that, I pursued my studies with another degree. I got a PhD in Philosophical Theology. So this is how, after the move and after my conversion, I ended up walking through the small door and into the world of Christian scholarship, without planning any of it, but I ended up being active and writing and researching and speaking, and what’s fun is that some of the folks that I studied initially turned out to be colleagues and friends, and the whole thing feels a bit surreal, but this is where I am now. You’ve coursed a long journey, from unbelief to not only just Christian belief but compelling, deep, scholarly Christian belief and debate, and that you are now one of the voices that people look to and listen to on very deep theological and philosophical areas, it’s really quite impressive. It sounds like, for someone who held truth to be supreme, that you still hold truth to be, in the person of Christ, to be incredibly supreme, not only in your life personally but contending for that in terms of the Christian worldview and even, like I say, at a deep and a scholarly level. For the skeptic who might be listening in, someone who thought they would never believe in God or never even think about investigating God, when I look at your life and listen to you, you are someone who obviously, again, is a brilliant thinker and someone worth looking to and hearing your wisdom. What would you say to someone who might be curious, at least, to investigate like you did? Yeah. So I don’t know that I’m necessarily in an awesome position to give them advice and tell them what to do, but here’s a couple of pieces that I will mention. The first is that, if they are intellectually curious, they should definitely consult some of the material that is discussed, controversial material, right? The debate material on the truth of Christianity, that there is some really good thinking happening and that there are some really good reasons to believe that God exists and that the Bible is actually reliable and that we get a good account of what happened to Jesus. So considering the intellectual case is one advice, and some of them have, some of them have never done that. I would recommend that you look into that, actually. And the other is a little bit more personal and dear to my heart, but it’s also the encouragement to not assume that you know who Jesus is, that you know because we’ve heard about Jesus and maybe you’ve attended church and you’ve heard a million stories, but I would recommend that you try the same experience as I did, which was to say, “Let’s forget about everything I’ve heard. Let’s pick up the sources and see what people actually saw and the kind of character that He was,” and I trust that this can be extremely transformative, to be put face to face with the real Jesus and not the one that we think we know. That’s good advice. And for the Christians who are listening in who, especially they may know someone in their life who’s not a Christian, but they want them to know. And you encountered Robert, for one, who is an intelligent Christian who sat down with you and answered questions in a thoughtful way, was patient with you in moving through this intellectual and spiritual and very personal material in different ways it affected your life. How would you advise Christians to engage with those who are skeptical or even searching? Yeah. So there’s a couple of pieces of advice that I like to give Christians while engaged in conversations with what could be old atheist self, right? So some of the things that I think worked quite well and that are a really good idea and encouragement. One would be to never assume that the person that you’re speaking with actually knows the Jesus of the Bible, so the same piece of advice applies here. Try to point them to the scriptures. First of all, as Christians, we’re convinced that the scriptures are alive, so there’s actually a spiritual benefit in reading the text. But just to point them to make for themselves a good opinion of what Jesus actually said and did, so to encourage them to learn, just on the historical realm. And the second is to not assume that they’ve heard the gospel, so as evangelical Christians, we like to think that this message is obviously the constantly proclaimed truth of the scriptures, that everyone has obviously heard that we are saved by faith in Jesus, that eternal life is not based on our own righteousness, but it’s purely by faith in Christ because He died on the cross to pay the penalty in our place. That message that I came to understand and accept as part of my conversion was radically new to me. I had never heard anything like that in over 25 years, and so I don’t want Christians to assume that this message is understood and known by everybody, and there’s very much a place in the conversation with an atheist to say, “Let’s forget a second whether or not it’s true. I’m not trying to yet convince you that any of this is true. But do you even know Christianity affirms? What is the message? And I’d be happy to tell you what it says before we can come to discuss whether that’s actually true,” and to explain that gospel succinctly, and I’ve done that with a number of folks, and I found there’s plenty of value in simply laying out the account on the table directly to say, “This is the message,” and to try to see if they actually understand this. And one test of whether they understand it, I have found, is that very often, right after I’ve explained this, the first thing that comes out of their mouth is the objection that Paul himself anticipated in Romans when he lays out the gospel. He anticipates somebody’s going to say, “Well, if we’re saved by faith. If our good works don’t do anything, then why not go on sinning just so that we can enjoy this and that grace may abound?” So Paul anticipates this, and I’m hearing this very often when I present this message, which tells me, “Yes. Now they get it.” So that’s a check where we understand. Now, the message is understood and correctly evaluated. It’s a very positive place to take the listener, and then we can discuss the merits of the message, obviously. But I think this is a helpful piece to do. Yes. Very, very helpful. As you say, I think oftentimes we’re coming from our own perspective and presuming what the other person knows and oftentimes, we’re very, very mistaken on that, and the gospel, I think is the most important thing, right? It’s why Jesus came. It’s the big question you had, “Why did He have to die?” And that is the most important question of all. Thank you for bringing that to the fore. And for those who are listening, I also want to let everyone know that Guillaume has put all of his story down in writing in a new book that he is publishing and releasing called Confessions of a French Atheist, Thank you so much, Guillaume, for coming on and telling your story. You’re just incredibly articulate, and we are all blessed by seeing what your journey was and just are so encouraged. You know, sometimes I think we look at someone and think they would never become a Christian, wouldn’t even think about becoming a Christian, but we look at you and see that God can reach down in extraordinary and very personal and powerful ways. And even gives you chills and goosebumps. Something extraordinary happened for you to stop in your tracks and just say, “No, I actually am going to investigate this.” It’s just amazing to me, story after story that I hear, where God reaches people and, like you say, in serendipitous ways almost, and circumstances, and He does that for us all, to be honest. Sometimes we don’t recognize that, but He’s a personal God who reaches us in personal ways. So thank you for coming on to share your story with us today. It was really my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jana. Oh, you’re so welcome. Thanks for tuning in to today to hear Guillaume’s story. You can find out more about his book, Confessions of a French Atheist, and how to follow him on Twitter in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. I hope you enjoyed it, if so that you would follow and share this podcast with your friends and social network and that you’ll rate and review it as well. 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.

MIT graduate Chris Lee was raised to reject religious superstition and embrace science alone.  His search beyond a purely naturalistic worldview led him to believe in God and Christianity.   To read Chris’ written story, you can read his article “My Christian Story” here   To read and listen to more stories of skeptics and atheists’ conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Stories Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist who surprisingly became a Christian. Why do atheists become atheists? There are as many answers to that question as there are atheists. Every skeptic has a reason, or more likely, every skeptic has several reasons for rejecting God. Sometimes, it’s on the back of bad experiences with Christians, Christianity, and faith. People or institutions who are supposed to represent truth and grace, lives of integrity and generosity, genuine love for God and others, well, they don’t. They’re supposed to demonstrate lives that have been transformed into something other, something more, something different, something better than what is normally expected by those who don’t claim God as authority and guide, but they don’t. If they reflect God, then they are poor ambassadors for the one they supposedly represent, or so it goes. Once someone starts to distrust Christians, they can begin to doubt the whole endeavor of Christianity and God. Belief is no longer attractive or plausible. It is no longer an option.  Today’s episode taps into this reality, the reality of human failure to embody God well. It can be very disorienting. It can lead to disbelief, and unfortunately, it often does. But the question in today’s episode is whether or not someone can find their way to belief in God despite all of this human failure. Let’s listen to Chris Lee’s story to find out.  Welcome to the Side B Stories podcast, Chris. It’s so great to have you with me today!  Thank you, Jana, for having me. Wonderful. Before we get into your story, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, where you live, maybe a little bit about your education, what you do?  Sure, absolutely. I live in the Boston area, in a little town called Braintree, about 10 miles south of the downtown. By day, I consider myself a software engineer in financial services, so fin tech, and by night, I jokingly say that I’m a cult fighter. I graduated from MIT in 1997, and also did my master’s degree in divinity at Gordon-Conwell Theological seminary. Oh, okay. So you’re pretty highly educated, and of course, in the Boston area, academics is prevalent there, so I’m sure we’ll find out more about what you mean by cult fighter?  Something like that, yes. Something like that. I forgot the exact term. But anyway, so that sounds very intriguing. I’m sure we’ll get to that later in the podcast. So you’re in Boston now. Let’s go back to your childhood and where you were born and grew up. Tell me a little bit about your family, whether they had any belief in God or not, or how they directed you.  Sure. I grew up in western Canada, in a city called Vancouver, a beautiful, amazing place to grow up. Very multicultural. And my parents, my dad was very much an atheist, a humanist, so did not have any beliefs, and in fact, had been very hurt by a number of Christians in his life, so he had very much turned against Christianity and was, as you might expect, anti Christian. My mother was very nominal. She might have gone to church a few times now and then in college, as well as afterwards, and certainly she had a belief in a higher power. She believed in God. She prayed, but it was not very evident in her life, and certainly if she mentioned that she was Christian, it was only in name. As I mentioned, the very nominal side. So that’s the background. So Vancouver. Is that—tell me, culturally speaking, is that much of a religious community?  No! Not at all. Okay.  I would say probably less than 20% even identify as Christians. Certainly, it’s very small. It’s maybe more than New England where I am, which is something like 5% or less evangelical and something like very nominally Roman Catholic, but certainly religion in western Canada was not a public thing and was not even a major factor in people’s lives. So did you have any exposure to what you would consider a more robust form of Christianity growing up? Any people that you knew? Or was that in your world at all?  Sure. So there’s kind of two major influences. My grandmother was very devout, but we didn’t have a lot of exposure to her. And then my best friend in high school was able to answer a lot of my questions, and he was and continues to be a very devout Christian today. And so whenever I had weird questions, like, “I don’t understand the Bible,” or, “I don’t understand this Trinity thing. This is weird,” I would go to my best friend in high school, Vern, and we’d talk about it. And he very cogently explained to me these doctrines. Okay. So you did have some influences. So as you were growing up, you had a father, you said, who was a secular humanist. He was an atheist. You had a mother who had a nominal expression of faith. So when you were growing up, did you have any belief in God? Were you following in the footsteps of your father or your mother? Or was it an issue or something—did you go to church? Talk with me about that.  Sure. So my younger brother and I were taken to church for a while, maybe off and on. Whenever we went on vacations or whenever it was convenient, so maybe a couple of times a month, and mostly to go to the Sunday school programs and socializing. And I really didn’t get much of the faith, and a lot of it seems like rituals, so I really didn’t understand why people did what they did, and then, when I was 12, my dad came up to me and said, “Well, Chris, you’re twelve. You’re old enough to make your own decisions. If this is what you want to do, then you have my,” whatever, equivalent of blessing, I guess. “You can do that, but if you don’t want to do it, then stop doing it.” And I said to him at that time, “Yeah, I don’t understand this. It makes no sense. I’m going to stop doing it.” And, also around the same point in time, we were talking about college applications already, at age twelve, and preparing for higher education, and also I had become very enamored of science. Kind of like Carl Sagan puts it, that the cosmos is all that is and all there ever was and all there ever would be. And really believed that science could or would be able to explain everything. And so I said, “Well, this all seems like superstitious hogwash. Every kind of religion, especially going to church and things like that.” So I, at that point in time, decided, “I’m going to be an atheist.” And it was a distinct moment in my life that I remember. It was over two years where I said, “I don’t believe any religion is true. I reject it all.” “All this stuff seems like either fantasy or hogwash, your choice.” So when you rejected God and that metaphysical reality, any kind of supernatural reality, by default, in a sense, you embraced a naturalistic view of the world.  Correct. I know you said you really honored or revered science in a way as being an ultimate explainer, in a sense, of the world and that there was not anything more than that. Would you say that you looked at the naturalistic worldview with any kind of critical eye at all, in terms of the logical implications of that naturalistic worldview? Or were you looking more at just the positive aspects of “intellectual people believe in science, not in hogwash.” What was your line of thinking around that time?  That’s a great question. So yes, absolutely, I actually carried through a number of the logical conclusions, so, in fact, we were being taught, not only evolution and all that it entails, but you can apply that also, you know the Darwinian evolution, to the survival of the fittest. And certainly in terms of implications, if I’m smarter than somebody else, I deserve to live longer or… deserve to have my opinions heard more rightly than other people. I became very elitist in a way. I’m kind of ashamed now to admit it, but I certainly had this air of superiority because I thought that my thinking was correct, more correct than others, and certainly that those who were more correct deserved to have their voices heard, and the less correct voices did not deserve to have their voices heard. So certainly I did carry through in some of those implications of what I believed. I didn’t fully see that certainly naturalism and humanism have certain assumptions, like, as you alluded to, if you basically eliminated all possibility of the supernatural, that it’s almost like, “Okay, everything has to be explained by science,” or it’s kind of like you’re almost using science in a way of being like god in the gaps instead of using God as the God of the gaps, things like that kind of argument. Yeah. That tells me a little bit about you, that you are, obviously, a critical thinker. That you are willing to look a little bit more closely at what you were embracing, not just what you were rejecting. So you were obviously a student, a teenager. You had embraced this atheistic identity. You were moving towards university and developing an elitist, intellectualist way of thinking, I guess to pursue your goals of academia and achievement. So I wonder, were most of your friends thinking in the same kind of way? Did you have a lot of friends who called themselves or identified as atheists as well?  I had some friends who were atheists, maybe one or two, and then the rest of them were largely agnostics, true agnostics, meaning they didn’t know, so in my mind there’s a major difference. Atheists are—within reason, you determine that there are no supernatural… there is no existence other than what we know. There is no possibility of any God or gods. And agnostics can range from, “Well, I’m not sure, and I’m not 100% certain that my position is correct,” or it doesn’t have to be 100% certainty that there are no gods, but maybe even 99%, 97% sure. That would be an atheist position, and then some agnostics were like, “Well, I haven’t thought through it enough, so I don’t know what to believe.” It strikes me, as you were talking about the embracing of your naturalistic worldview, that there was somewhat of a Darwinian perspective on who was perhaps the stronger or the more fit. And I think that oftentimes there is a dismissal of the religious in that kind of scenario and almost a contemptuousness. Did you ever have a sense of that? As just a part of your atheistic worldview?  I didn’t get to that point where I saw all, whether it was Christianity or other religions, as having zero credibility and zero value. I think I was much more a pragmatist about it and very utilitarian. It’s like, “Okay, well, I guess some Christians do function as counselors, and they give free counseling and help out the homeless. Okay, yeah, that’s somewhat useful,” and I definitely heard a number of my brother’s sentiments, whether that’s expressing that Christianity is just a crutch for those who are mentally weak or other sentiments that are similar. So you lived with this perspective for a little while, while you were in high school. So take us on your journey from there. How long were in this atheistic perspective? What, if anything, kind of starting making you question, perhaps, your own perspective and becoming open towards another?  Sure. So I would say it was just over two years, maybe somewhere between two and two and a half years, that I very much would self-identify as an atheist and would tell you, “I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in anything. I believe science can explain everything or will explain everything.” And I think even I had an atheist high school teacher who questioned that a little bit, and he said, “Well, wait a second. Are you sure that science will be able to explain everything?” I was like, “Wait. You’re an atheist. Aren’t you supposed to accept that science will or can explain everything?” But it was really a set of three circumstances that really made me think that maybe atheism is not correct or maybe that there is an existence outside of what we know, outside of a naturalistic environment. So the first thing was I was walking home—this was in, I think, the end of seventh grade or eighth grade or something like that, and I was walking home from my school, and on the way home, there’s one side of the road that has a sidewalk, and the other side has no sidewalk, and the other side that doesn’t have a sidewalk is actually further, and for whatever reason, I decided I’m going to cross the sidewalk. And a car came over, kind of barreling out of control, on the side of the sidewalk, where I was standing, and I thought to myself, “Well, that’s really strange. It’s completely illogical and irrational to cross the street where it would be a further path and it’s not got a sidewalk, and crossing the street, I could’ve been hit by a car. Does this make sense?” And it’s like, “I wouldn’t have seen the car coming from behind me, either, but it did eventually run over that piece of sidewalk. So hmm.” That was a little puzzling, and I didn’t think anything much more when that happened. Like it was a near miss?  Yeah. It was a near miss. Well, that was an unusual piece of intuition, that I crossed the street and should have been dead, and I’m alive. And there’s no rational reason for this. So, okay, whatever. And then, the second time, my mother was driving my brother and I back from whatever it was, I think from the high school, and she had just finished the night shift, so she was overly tired, and she forgot to stop at a stop sign, and a car kind of came over the hill and broadsided us. And it was on my side of the car, but five seconds before the accident happened, I’d actually unbuckled myself and moved over to the center of the car. Not seeing the car. I just unbuckled myself and moved. And again, I was like, “My goodness! I survived another crash and could have been seriously hurt.” My mother actually did have whiplash and concussion, and she had to wear a neck brace for many months afterwards, whereas I didn’t have any injuries whatsoever. And it was very remarkable. So again, it was kind of like, “What?” I should have been fully seat belted and not taken it off at any point in time, but for whatever reason, I moved. And then a third time we were passing in between two warehouse buildings, and there was a railway crossing, and there was actually a train coming our way, but the gate had not dropped and there was no signal, and we barely missed it. It was—I don’t know—six feet? Ten feet? It couldn’t have been more than that. And so there was a series of situations that I realized, like, “Probabilistically, I should be dead. And if I had followed everything rationally, done everything rationally, stayed on the same side of the sidewalk where eventually the car would’ve run over, kept my seat belt on, that I should be dead. And yet here I am alive, and all these things not very rational.” Right.  “So is there perhaps something more than what I see, maybe more than rationality, maybe more than naturalism,” and so that led me to thinking, “Okay, maybe I should think there is the possibility of a supernatural,” and then at that point I kind of went from atheist to agnostic. And I definitely would not say I was a Christian, did not want to explore Christianity at that point in time, but at least at that point in time, I would have put it this way, “I’m open to some existence beyond the natural, whether that’s God, gods, goddesses, whatever. I’m open to it. And maybe I should go look into these things.” So this was at the age of fourteen. Okay. So then you started looking, I presume, and tell me about that journey. Where did you go first? What did you start looking at first?  So I was very interested in pantheism, so I started exploring Greco-Roman gods and explored that to its logical conclusion. It was like, “Okay, maybe more gods is better, and having a god for everything.” So I’d already studied Egyptian mythology, Norse mythology, Greco-Roman gods, even Hindu gods, and it seems like, to me, that if there were such gods or goddesses, they were very haphazard, like throwing dice with our lives. And, for the Egyptians, it was like, there’s a god for everything. There’s a god of Nile. There’s a god of the dead. There’s a god of fertility. There’s a god of the rain. There’s a god of the sun. And so on and so forth. And certainly I think, as I’ve read, in retrospect, as a Christian now, when we use the word universe, it’s like one out of many, and we’re trying to make sense of the diversity of life and the diversity of… whether it’s beetles or whether it’s life forms or numerous other things, and I think that the pantheism appeals to the diversity, trying to explain that, but it didn’t do a good job of trying to unify, “Why does science make sense?” “Why is physics so mathematical and so elegant and so beautiful?” The pantheism doesn’t unite very well there. And so I slowly rejected polytheism or pantheism. I moved into human wisdom religions, so Taoism, Buddhism. I actually practiced a number of things. Like, “I feel hungry!” “No, I don’t, because this is causing me to be imbalanced, and I should not have strong desires, because that’s what causes conflict.” And so I practiced a number of these things, and I realized later, especially becoming Christian, that it’s like, well, sometimes God does work through our desires. Certainly, we love justice. We love beauty. We love truth as Christians. And certainly even compassion or things like that… There’s a number of virtues that Christianity espouses, and these are things that we should strive for. If justice doesn’t matter and we should have no desires for justice, well, who cares? Just let everybody do their own thing. And then we get anarchy and chaos, but anyways. Yeah. I was going to say, there are such things as good desires.  Right, absolutely. Worthy. Yeah.  And also that there are some times that God does tell us, as a Christian, it’s like, “Well, I’m feeling tired.” Well, is it legitimate, like I didn’t get enough sleep? Or maybe I did work really hard for 12 hours on physical labor or things like that. And so my body is telling me, “Hey, maybe it’s time to get some sleep.” Instead of saying, “Okay, I’ve got to deny myself and not have these desires for sleep,” or whatever. So I actually slowly but surely rejected those human wisdom religions. I actually had my own Tarot card deck. I had crystals. I was playing around with that. I was into horoscopes and into biorhythms and all kinds of things. And that seemed a little arbitrary. And then eventually I got back to monotheism. And I studied with a rabbi, and we read the Old Testament. He instructed me fairly well. I actually had a very strong sense of the holiness of God. That’s one of the major themes of the Old Testament. A number of the books, especially Leviticus, emphasize God’s holiness. And whether it’s Isaiah 6 or numerous other passages, that God’s moral perfection and that He’s utterly sinless and that no fellowship can exist between a being of utter absolute moral perfection and sinlessness and imperfect, finite creatures. And so I actually was struck with a sense of my own sinfulness and my unworthiness because of that experience, and I was like, “Okay, this is nice. I’m glad I studied it. Okay. Moving on.” And then I studied Islam, and I actually had my own copy of the Koran and read it a lot, and it struck me as like, “Well, if we actually carried a number of the statutes, like carried eye to an eye, unfortunately what we see is, like, “Okay. You knock off my brother. I don’t know why. I’m going to go knock off your family or several of your brothers,” or things like that. And then there were later hadiths that had to address, like, “Okay, you can’t deal with other followers of the way that way,” or the followers of the way of peace that way. And I realized that a number of the things in Islam were untenable if you follow it through philosophically. You can’t do that as a society. You can’t do that even as a family. And I cannot exercise eye for an eye. And that will only perpetuate a cycle of violence and wrongdoing. And so I came back to Christianity, and I had already been somewhat instructed by the Jewish rabbi and others, that the Old Testament ends at basically Malachi in our canon, and then Matthew is the first book, and of course, as soon as you dive into Matthew and right after the genealogy, you get into, within chapters five through seven, the Sermon on the Mount. And this was mind blowing to me. It was like, “Oh! Of course! This is correct! This is how you defeat evil. Turn the other cheek and not retaliate.” So it actually surprised me. Caught me off guard. In contrast to everything that I had studied beforehand. And even… Jesus has the passage about prayer, and so I said, “Okay. Let me try this. Maybe it might work. God, if You are real,” I remember praying, “please show Yourself to me. Please guide me or help me understand,” and I did have the distinct impression that this was happening and that… My best friend from high school started spending more time with me, and taking me to things, some of his youth group activities, although they weren’t terribly overtly Christian. They were more social. But, anyway, my best friend Vern explained to me a number of things at that point in time, so I was much more open and saying, “I don’t understand the Trinity. I don’t understand why God has so many names. What is this?” And so my friend was very patient and kind of took me through and explained to me what it meant and slowly but surely I think I was like, “Okay, I can see that. That seems reasonable.” So he laid that foundation. So you were, at this point—how old were you then? You said later in high school?  So this was—Vern and I started spending a lot of time when I was sixteen and seventeen. So at this point in time. And you had been, it sounds like, on a very diligent exploration, exploring all of these different potential faith traditions that didn’t seem to have substance, or at least didn’t seem to satisfy your understanding of God or faith or how it relates to reality or the human condition perhaps.  Right. Except when you got to the Old Testament. Then it really peered into the human heart. You said you felt the holiness of God.  Yes. Which that can be daunting. But I love what you talked about when you started reading the New Testament, and you started with the stories of Jesus, the gospel narratives, and that there was something palpably different, in the sense that there was something there a little bit different than what you had felt or experienced before. Now, again, I’m thinking about this. You had moved from atheism to agnosticism. Agnosticism but with an openness and a willingness to see these different faith traditions or religions for what they were. You were willing to actually take them on, to try them experientially, which again I think is very laudable, in your search. Rather than just looking at things intellectually, you actually tried them out experientially. I’m curious. When you started reading the New Testament and you obviously, as an inquisitive person, you started critically thinking, and you had these big questions. And Vern was there, and he was helping guide you. Was he a good resource? Or was he, let me just say, more than a nominal Christian? Was he able to engage with you in a way that was intellectually satisfying? Able to answer your questions? And also was he someone who actually embodied Christianity in a meaningful way? Not just nominally. Not just by name only but actually took it seriously. Yeah. Vern has always been rock solid in his faith. And he’s very much self-identified not only as a Christian but been very serious about his Christian faith. At that point in time, even when we were both sixteen and seventeen, he had certainly internalized his family’s faith but also had explored it and was able to articulate why he believed what he believed and could explain a number of things in his faith. And I don’t ever recall that Vern was ever at a loss. He knew his stuff, and he really knew his faith. So you obviously knew that he was a Christian, and you… because I think sometimes we wonder how we can start meaningfully engaging with those who aren’t Christians, but you obviously knew something about him that you were willing to engage with him, ask him questions, and he was approachable, which sounds pretty wonderful. As you were reading the Bible and it has this miraculous content, as a former naturalist, when you were reading those kinds of things, was that off putting? So it was actually a long process for me to come to actually accept the Bible was true. So I think I started exploring Christianity when I was sixteen, and I would not have ever said, “Yeah, I’m definitely a Christian.” In fact, I remember distinctly going off to MIT and thinking, “Okay, when I get my life in order, and when I finish my PhD or something like that, then I might consider exploring Christianity more seriously, and maybe then I’ll think about becoming a Christian,” and things like that. So it was not even on my radar when I went to MIT. Okay.  And so it was actually about a three-year journey, from sixteen to nineteen, where there were a number of things, and even, shockingly, you might find, at MIT, there were a number of professors who were Christians, including my academic advisor and now the department head of AeroAstro. That’s Daniel Hastings is a devout Christian. He was my undergraduate advisor. And then there were numerous other ones, and then little hints here and there, like they talk about Cantor sets or Gödel and his formulation of God and actual infinities and things like that, talking pretty high level, but I was resonating with this, and I was going, “Huh. I never thought of it that way,” in terms of actual infinities as a way to prove our God. And there were a number… I had a material science professor who jokingly mentioned that some MIT students, pranksters that they were, they decided, “Oh, let’s enter a wine contest and figure out how to synthetically make a wine, and they combined, obviously, ethanol and various carbon compounds and things like that, and then they entered the wine contest,” and the judges were like, “Oh, this is really, really good! Where did you get the grapes?” and they were like, “Uh, yeah. We can’t tell you that. Proprietary knowledge,” or whatever, and they got busted, and they got eliminated, but they synthetically created a wine from water, carbon compounds, and alcohol, ethanol. So the idea of even Jesus turning water to wine suddenly became far less far-fetched. And obviously somebody who is very advanced in technology could do these things, but obviously the technology didn’t exist back then, so it even argues that somebody who was the Creator of the universe, or somebody who had mastery over nature and the elements, would be far superior in order of magnitude than any human being that existed. So even my time at MIT kind of opened me to a Christian worldview. Wow. That’s interesting. So it sounds like, even though you were trying to venture a little bit away from thinking about God, that you entered into an environment where actually there were some very high-level discussions about that very reality. So did that kind of bring you back around to thinking more seriously about the potential for God’s existence?  Sure. I think I would say that, somewhere between… I was eighteen or nineteen, and certainly whether it was my freshman year sometime or by that summer, I had accepted that, “Okay, the Christian God exists. Even if I’m not a Christian,” like I would not self-identify as a Christian at that point in time. I did say the Christian God exists, and certainly my sense of His holiness prior to the end of high school and my own unworthiness kind of alluded to that, or at least gave me some sense of that. And certainly towards the summer of my freshman year, so as a rising sophomore at MIT, my best friend in high school took me to a number of church events that I started to realize, “Oh, the Bible is not just abstract and full of weird stories and genealogies. It’s very practical and applies to my life.” And of course I’m not ready to live it yet. This forgiveness thing, too hard, not going to try. And the moral codes. “Nah, nah. Not for me. It would be too hard. Nice ideas, certainly, but not ready to follow after the steps of Jesus.” So I would not, again, identify myself as a Christian. I was, at that point in time, age eighteen, turning nineteen, at least recognizing, “Okay, the Christian God exists. I recognize His existence and certainly His presence in my life, and it makes sense of all that I’ve gone through, and certainly I recognize the Bible is factual and credible and certainly practical.” So that’s where I was. So you embraced it a bit intellectually.  Yeah. That it was propositionally true or historically true?  Yes. But you weren’t willing or able to… willing, I guess, is the right word.  Yes. To embrace it personally. So then what happened? How long did you stay in this bit of an ambivalent state?  Sophomore year, I was launched into grades, so I kind of threw myself wholeheartedly into my grades and was getting straight As even at MIT, and even my professors were patting me on the back, saying, “Keep it up,” “You’re doing great,” “Whatever you’ll want will be open to you,” whether that’s graduate studies or whether that’s working for NASA or whatever else. And so it seemed like the world was my oyster, and I was really working hard, too. I was maintaining some extracurriculars and successfully auditioned… Out of ten french hornists, I was the only one who selected for MIT Symphony Orchestra, and it was a fabulous experience, and numerous other extracurriculars. So I was doing everything that I’d ever wanted to do, and yet I felt like it was empty. And so kind of this existential angst here. I had finished up one of several all nighters, so sophomore year in Aeronautics and Astronautics, which is nicknamed rocket science. And I came into my room and was thinking to myself, “Hey! Everything that I’ve ever wanted has come about. I’m at MIT. I’m doing incredible. I’m doing research. I’m involved with all these extracurriculars. I’m at the top of my game.” It’s like, “If this is the best life now, I’m living it,” and it wasn’t a nadir or I’d lost everything. I was at the top. And yet it was like, “Is that all that there is in life?” Like, “I’ve accomplished everything that I’ve ever wanted, and yet why do I feel like something is missing? There’s something else.” And I had packed a red King James Bible, which I kept on the left side of my dresser, and coming back into my room, I was thinking through, and I was like, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure if I kept this up, I’d be doing fine in life, and then what? Then get married? Then get a job? Get whatever, and what does this all mean?” And I was at a loss for answers, but as I came into my room, my eye fell on my King James, and I opened it up. “Seek first the kingdom, and all these things will be given to you as well. Seek first His kingdom.” And I realized, “You know? Yeah. I don’t know. Chris doesn’t know what’s right, what’s best for Chris. I think I might.” And later, as I became a Christian and I started studying, I realized, “Yeah, there is a big God-shaped void in my heart, and I’ve been trying to stuff it full of everything else, of extracurriculars and achievements,” and it wasn’t satisfying. And it’s not like God necessarily changes you and you become like the Borg or whatever. It’s not like that when you become a Christian. God reorders your life, and it’s not like I had a lobotomy after I became a Christian and was dumb thereafter. It continued to be intellectual and use my intellect to honor God. But at that point in time, late October 1991, I was 19 years old, and I think I remember praying, like, “God, I don’t know what’s best for my life. I don’t even know how this is supposed to go. I know that You know because You have seen the past, the present, the future. I know how this is supposed to go. I know You know better than I know what I need, and please help me find people who will help me order my life as would please You.” So you surrendered. I mean, you finally came to that place where you were willing to go His way instead of your own.  Right, exactly. Right. Wow. And so you said that was… You had kind of reached the pinnacle and it wasn’t enough and then you surrendered. And then, I’m curious. In terms of your Christian faith walk, have you been able to find that sense of fulfillment or satisfaction or meaning that seemed so elusive for you when you had everything?  So it has not been easy. And sometimes the route is very circuitous. So even though I prayed for God to put people in my life who would teach me the Bible or teach me His way, I got involved with a deviant group, the Boston Church of Christ, at that point in time. In fact, one of my friends in the MIT Symphony Orchestra had just joined the Boston Church of Christ, the extended International Churches of Christ, and he had been seeking out people that he was going to try to bring in. And so, because we were pretty good friends, he decided to invite me, and I got involved with the Boston Church of Christ. And that was a little bit over 2-1/4 years of that, and kind of a long story short, it took an amount of time of searching after that before I came back to Christianity again. So certainly a lot of looking for the truth and trying to understand what is the truth, and then I came back to Christianity, and then in trying to align my life with God, I did eventually make a lot of sense of my difficulties, my suffering, my circuitous route in life, and things like that. So it hasn’t been easy. It hasn’t been like going from mountain to mountain to mountain to mountain. It’s been very circuitous. And for those who aren’t familiar, just in a nutshell, the Boston Church of Christ is not what you would consider an orthodox Christian group. I presume from your work with cults that you would consider this group to be cult-like or a cult. Is that right?  Sure. So there’s a number of synonyms, because the word “cult” can certainly bring out a lot of strong emotions, so I try to avoid the word cult sometimes. Certainly, we can talk about either authoritarian groups or totalitarian groups, groups that tell you how to run your life or that bring out unhealthy psychological dynamics. Certainly yes. Absolutely. Or we could talk about spiritually abusive groups or groups that cause codependency, especially on leaders or other members. Yes, absolutely. So I try and use synonyms for the word cult, yes. It is not an orthodox group. It’s not terribly healthy. In a nutshell, yes. But you found your way out of that group and found, a healthy, normative kind of Christian church, I presume.  Yeah. So that, again, is circuitous. In a nutshell, I went from… My friends that I consider Christians outside of the Boston Church of Christ were shocked when I started hanging out with them. They were like, “Hey, Chris. Did you know you’re hanging out with the members of the Boston Church of Christ?” And I was like, “Yes, I did.” And then they’re like, “You know there’s all this controversy, and let us give you numerous pages and numerous articles about how controversial they are.” And it’s like, “Oh, my gosh! What have I gotten myself into?” And then I made the mistake of, again playing the scientific principles, so it’s like, “Okay, I won’t tell them I’m looking for something, and if I don’t see it, it must not happen anymore,” but that was the wrong leap of logic. It was, “If it doesn’t happen, it probably is that they’re not telling me,” much like in corporations. It’s on a need-to-know basis, rather than total transparency. And so I was very committed to the Boston Church of Christ for a number of years, and then even became a leader, and was actually, for having some integrity, like I really believed that there were Christians outside of our group, unlike the Boston Church of Christ, that I tried to present to the conciliation meeting and failed horribly, but it got back that I was orchestrating it and that I dared to question that there are issues, like things that could be improved in the Boston Church of Christ, so I was kicked out. And I can honestly say that was God acting, because I would not have had the strength to leave, and I would not have chosen to leave on my own. And the people have since, numerous of my friends who have left have apologized, and I was like, “No, no, no. Nothing to apologize for. We were kind of under that mindset and being unduly influenced.” I had to unwind a lot of that stuff and figure out, “Okay, what does Christianity actually teach?” And, “What is actually correct?” And it was examining my faith. And that led me to studying the scriptures even more intensely and in the original languages and studying church history and theology and things like that. Kind of a weird coincidence, when I was involved with the Boston Church of Christ, one of the deans of administration at MIT had kind of taken me aside and said, “You know, I know you’re involved with the Boston Church of Christ. You really should take some time and study maybe at a theological institute. Study your church history. Study your original languages. Study your theology,” and at that time, when I was a member, I scoffed at him. “All you need is the Bible.” And I had done poorly. My grades had kind of plummeted when I was involved with the Boston Church of Christ, and I had to take some time off. And then eventually… That was kind of a further purification process, too. It’s like I had to get rid of everything, all preconceptions of who I was, so I had kind of wound myself up to be, like, “Okay, I’m this really smart guy who is an MIT student,” and suddenly, I was stripped of all that. I had to take some time off. No chance of returning for at least a year. And then I had to claw my way back to finish, and then eventually did finish, and all these experiences had kind of led me to a point where I was like, “I’d really like to study my faith better, not only for myself, but also to teach it well. And that led me to seminary, and I actually asked that dean for his recommendation letter. And as well, I got involved with a much healthier church, and there were a lot of people who were refugees from the Boston Church of Christ there. Then, you have a heart, obviously, for those who get wrapped up in things like that. I’d like to ask you a question. As someone who is such a thinker and with an appreciation for philosophy and science and theology, there’s often a push back against Christianity that, if you believe in science that you cannot believe in God or religion or have faith. How would you answer a skeptic or someone who raises that objection, that you cannot believe in them both together?  Sure. No. Absolutely. That’s a great question. I was fortunate that I got to meet Alvin Plantinga when he was at Harvard, and he exactly lectured on this. And the way he put is this: There seems to be very superficial concord between scientism, which is really what it is. It’s not just science, but it’s scientism. It’s a purely science and naturalistic point of view. But there’s actually some deeper discord in the ways that they actually conflict, so it’s almost like you have to outright object or get rid of any of the supernatural. You have to ignore a lot of things, and so while there is very superficial concordance between scientism and atheism or humanism, but also linked to truth, that there’s much deeper concordance between Christianity and science. And not surprisingly, there are a number of Christians at MIT who were strong Christians but also strong engineers and strong scientists. And they didn’t see a conflict. Yeah. There’s a basic order and rationality to the universe itself, and the elegance of mathematics, and the way that you’re able to even pursue observation and evidence and that there’s a predictability to it. And all of those things that would not be unless there was a transcendent source. Even your own rationality, right?  Right. Absolutely. There’s a comprehensibility to the universe. And we have a mind that can comprehend. So there’s just so many things with regard to actually belief in God that allows you, like you say, to even understand the physical nature of the universe and science. It’s really quite wonderful and elegant when you look at it. And there are those, like you say, that have brilliant minds that can see all of that and that there’s no conflict.  So as we’re wrapping up, Chris, let’s kind of turn for a moment. If you had a skeptic sitting in front of you who was actually curious. Maybe think back to when you were in high school and you were actually looking. “There has to be something more. I feel it.” Or, “I intuit.” Or, “I have an experience,” like you did, that they’re, “Okay, there’s something more, and I want to search for it.” There’s an open willingness there. What would you say to that skeptic? How would you speak to them?  Yeah. Obviously how Christianity is lived out and how it is practiced is going to be a little to quite flawed. Go to the source and look at what Christianity actually is. And go to the author of Christianity, Jesus Christ Himself, Who I believe is the only perfect person who ever lived. And see the difference, the qualitative difference of his teachings as compared to Buddha or Mohammad or numerous other teachers. And also be open to Christianity and kind of look beyond—even if you look at my life, I’m sorry, I’m a horrible signpost. I’m a flawed person. And I will be the first to admit that, yes, this means I’m a sinner, and I don’t live up to the ideals which I’d like to espouse. But look to those ideals. Look to the ideals of Christianity. And see whether they’re true. And not only that, that Christianity is not just head knowledge, but it’s also about a relationship. And how would I approach a relationship, right? I’d want to talk to that person, get to know that person, and maybe figure things out. And as I hinted at some of my early turnings, it was about prayer, and I had to turn to God and say, “Hey, I really don’t know if You’re real. I kind of feel silly sometimes, but show me. Please guide me.” And even with all hesitancy that you might have, like you might know you’re certain that He is there or whatever, but try. And try talking to Him. And try getting to know Him, this God that we profess. That’s wonderful. I think, as I’m reflecting on your story, too, as you’re talking and prior to accepting Christ, you felt this great weight of sin. And the holiness of God, but yet you said, right there, that Jesus was the only perfect person who could ever live, and He lifts that burden from you, right? He lifts and forgives your sin, so that you don’t have to bear that burden anymore, and I think that’s a really beautiful part of Christianity. If you turned for a moment then to talk with Christians who may know someone or are engaged with those who don’t believe, how would you best advise them to engage? Like Vern did with you. Sure. I actually still have a number of friends who are atheists and not Christians, and to this day, one of my best friends from MIT is an atheist, and I think he admires that I’m truthful, and I’ll be happy to point out the flaws, and there’s times where he’s like, “Hey, Chris,” his name’s Matt. He has a PhD from Cornell in statistics now, and he’s more fascinated about Christianity from an intellectual point of view, but Matt will say, “Hey, Chris. I’d like to watch Jesus Camp with you sometime and get your insights.” And sometimes I’ve used interesting analogies, so it’s like, “Well, there is definitely some people in the church that I’m like, ‘Okay, you know Crazy Uncle Bob who just wants to talk about fishing all the time? Or Aunt Emma who just has 57 cats, and she’s the crazy cat aunt, and whatever else.’ Yeah there’s some of that in our background, and I’m sorry. They’re a part of the family still, too. And yeah, I’ve got to accept them, and it is what it is, but hopefully there are some more sane parts of the family that you can identify with and get along with,” so there’s definitely times where I haven’t tried to hide all of our warts and pimples and things like that. It’s like, “I’ve got crazy parts of my family and also in the extended family, and that’s also true in Christ, and that’s okay. We’re imperfect. But we are part of the same family, and yeah, maybe I would really like them not to be, but they are.” And also having an open dialogue with them, so Matt knows that he can talk to me about anything, and we have actually a pretty interesting relationship, like we’ll talk about the New Atheists, and he’ll have read them, and I’ll have read them, and we’ll compare notes. And although Matt is an atheist, he’s never been like, “Chris, you’re crazy for believing what you believe.” He’s respected it, and even with my work with cults, he’ll see, “Okay, so you’re basically a specialist. And you deal with all those weird parts of the family that people don’t want to really acknowledge exist. So yeah. Good for you. Good on you.” So he respects you.  Yes. And what I love about what you’re saying here is that you keep an open dialogue. You speak with him intellectually on his terms. You read things together. You discuss them. You have a nice open dialogue. It’s not defensive. It’s inquisitive. You learn from each other. And I really appreciate that you have ongoing relationships, because I think that’s tremendous. I think that’s huge. Wow! What a story! Chris, amazing story. Amazing life. And amazing intellect, too. And I think that bodes well for really demonstrating—your whole story demonstrates this real strong intellectual pursuit of truth and what’s real. And that you have come to a place of not only believing it intellectually but giving your life to the One Who exists, Who’s real, Who lived the perfect life. And so He’s obviously transformed you and given you loads of meaning and purpose in your life.  Mm-hm. So I just really appreciate you coming on board today to talk to us about your story.  Thank you for your time. Very good.  Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Stories Podcast to hear Chris’s story. You can find out more about his ministry, Exposing Cults, by visiting his website, which I’ll put in the episode notes. If you enjoyed it, 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.