eX-skeptic

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.   

Kyle‘s childhood faith disappeared when he began questioning Christianity, finding no answers.  His inquisitive mind led him on a long journey to find the truth. bkylekeltz.com Kyle‘s recommendation for apologetics reading for those who want to know more of the evidence for the Christian worldview: On Guard by William Lane Craig 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 was once an atheist or skeptic but who surprisingly became a Christian. It’s often believed by atheists that there is no evidence for God, that science is the sole source of knowledge, and that science points to a godless reality. There is no need to impose a God explanation any longer, they think. We are beyond that, more sophisticated than that. Science has or will have all of the answers eventually. It is acknowledged by both secular thinkers and Christians that science does provide knowledge of how and when the material universe acts and reacts, causes and effects, and that much can be known through the scientific method. That is not in dispute.  But what happens when scientific observations actually point towards the need for an explanation outside of material universe in order to understand and explain what we see of the universe itself? What happens when investigating science causes someone to question their own secular understanding of reality? That which we observe and measure needs greater explanation than the material world itself.  But within atheism, the closed universe of cause and effect is all there is, was, or ever will be. We are pieces in the clockwork of the universe, winding down to an inevitably encroaching end, with no real meaning or purpose in life.  What happens when that sense of personal emptiness begins to take root? There are points of tension intellectually, personally. Competing explanatory worldviews are on the table. How does someone decide which one is true? These are but a couple of the issues faced by our guest, philosopher Kyle Keltz, in his journey from atheism to belief in God. I hope you’ll stay with us to hear his story.  Welcome, Kyle. It’s so great to have you today!  Hi, Jana. Thank you so much for having me on. Wonderful. So glad to have you. I am curious, as we’re getting started. Kyle, can you tell us a little bit about who you are, before we go back into your story. Tell me about your life now?  Okay, yes. Well, my name’s Kyle Keltz. I live in Lubbock, Texas. I’m married to Laci. I have two sons, who are eight and six. Their names are Thomas and Jack. I have a PhD in philosophy of religion from Southern Evangelical Seminary. I also got a master’s degree in apologetics from the same seminary. Like I said, I live here in Lubbock, Texas. I work at South Plains College, where I teach Introduction to Philosophy, Intro to World Religions, and English Composition. Okay. Wow! You’ve got a full plate!  Yes. And it sounds like you are a strong proponent of the Christian worldview at this point, but I know you were not always there in that place of a proponent of Christianity. So let’s go back. Let’s start at the beginning and your childhood. Tell me a little bit about where you were born and your family and whether or not God was anywhere to be found in your home environment or among your friends.  Okay. Yeah. So I grew up in—well, they call it west Texas. It’s actually closer to the panhandle, around Lubbock. I was born in Lockney, Texas. I claim Lubbock. But I think I had a pretty typical middle-class upbringing in the Bible Belt. I loved playing video games from an early age. That’s mostly what I did. But as far as God—was there religion in our family? There definitely was. When I’ve thought back on this in the past, I’ve called this nominal Christians. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize I don’t really think that’s the case. I think I was just more hardheaded than anything. Both of my parents are Christians. They’ve usually served in the music side of ministry in churches. But they both talked to us about Christianity. They both tried to get us to go—I say “us.” I have a sister. They’d try to get us to go to church every Sunday, and the more I think about it, I think they had a huge influence on me eventually becoming a Christian. So I think it was around when I was—1989, when I was about eight years old, I do have a memory of my mom talking to us like she usually did about heaven and hell, and I remember thinking, “Well, I want to be with my family and go to heaven,” and I actually remember, when I was eight, that I prayed for Jesus to come into my heart. So that was kind of the extent of it. Growing up, we would go to church. I don’t know. Like I said, I think I was more hardheaded than anything, more immature. I didn’t listen much at church. I didn’t like going to church. I fell asleep a lot. And it became like a habit. I just would go to church and fall asleep in the sermon. Didn’t like going to Sunday school that much. But my parents were great. They had a good influence on me. I think I have a memory—I even tried to read through the Bible in the seventh grade. I didn’t make it. I think I stalled out probably in Numbers or something, but yeah. I mean, they had a good influence on me. I just wasn’t into it that much really. Okay, yeah. So you had kind of a childhood faith. Your family, obviously, were believers in Christianity. You went to church. And it was just part of your life and the rhythm of things. I’m curious. Did you have any other friends who were invested in Christianity at all? Or were you just kind of hanging out with guys who pretty much felt the same way you did?  Oh. Yeah, that’s a good question, Jana. So most of my friends didn’t, if I remember correctly. Especially… One of the big turning points for me was in high school, is whenever I started claiming to be an atheist. At that time, most of my friends weren’t involved in church. I did have one that was highly involved, but thinking back to [sic] graduate school, I don’t even remember talking about religion with any of my friends. We moved around a lot, so I had to make friends everywhere we went, and one of the ways I did it was I just—an easy icebreaker for me was, “Do you like video games?” Okay.  And if they said, “No,” then it was awkward, but if they said, “Yes,” then I could almost instantly make a friend, but that was kind of… Usually, me and my friends, we would just go play or ride bikes, go play in town or play video games, and I don’t remember talking about religion with just about anybody. It wasn’t until really high school that I did have a friend who, still to this day, is a really strong Christian. And he was back then. But most of my friends weren’t. So you said you started thinking more that you didn’t want to or didn’t believe in Christianity when you were in high school? Tell me about that.  I think it was in junior high or a little bit younger—and thinking things that probably most kids don’t think. Like I remember one time sitting in my room thinking about what it would be like if nothing existed. I’ve just always had this mind that I was always daydreaming and/or thinking about why we’re here and things like that, so that really started to come to a head in high school, and that’s when I actually started questioning whether Christianity was true or not. And I haven’t said that—like I said, up to this point, I’m almost 100% sure, 99% sure that I wasn’t a Christian. Because my understanding was that I had prayed for Jesus to be in my heart, so that was my understanding of what it was to be a Christian. But I don’t think I understood the gospel message. But I still called myself a Christian. At this point, I think it was my junior or senior year, I started to really question everything. I remember I had so many objections to Christianity but the more I learned about Christianity later on, the more I realized that they were all kind of—like I wasn’t objecting to Christianity. I was objecting to my misconceptions of what Christianity was. But I do remember one issue I had was that I thought—I did look in the Old Testament, and I saw that God was commanding the Jews to take over the land of Canaan, and I was like, “That doesn’t seem like something a good God would command. It just seems like maybe the Jews were just using their idea of some god as an excuse to do conquest.” I also had questions like—I didn’t think that Christianity made sense because I would tell people, “Well, you know, if Jesus is the only way to be saved, but He just only showed up 2,000 years ago, what about all the people before Him? Does that mean that they all went to hell?” And I had many questions that were similar to that, and I just—the people I would ask—I can’t remember if I talked to my parents about it or not, but the people I did ask didn’t have the answers. And I got to the point where I didn’t think anybody had the answers. And a lot of times, I just wouldn’t even talk about it, because, to a certain point—I was pretty convicted it wasn’t true, but I didn’t want to argue to other people that it wasn’t true and hurt their beliefs, you know? Right, right. Or perhaps even—like your parents. I’m sure that would be a difficult conversation to have.  Yeah. But when I asked people, it was mainly just people from church or friends that I knew that I thought would know something about it. It was mainly just asking the people I knew these questions, not really… And that’s what blows me away now, knowing how much apologetic material was out there during this time, I can’t believe I missed all of it… but yeah. I think it’s easy to miss if it’s not, if those kind of answers aren’t to be found in your culture, in your circle of friends, family, church, whatever. So you started having these doubts. You were internally questioning the reality of Christianity. You began to, I guess, intellectually push away from it? And you were keeping quiet about it. It sounds like you were… I guess, like you said before, it may have been a bit too much of an uncomfortability to let it to be known that you were an atheist among your own circles?  Yes. Now I was outspoken with my friends. I think I was just quiet about it with my family. I wasn’t sure how they would take it. I think maybe eventually I told them. What happened was I graduated from high school, and I went straight into the Army, and I had signed up for college money basically, but I signed up for the army to go serve for 4-1/2 years, and when I left the house, I really became like a staunch atheist. I actually still have some dog tags in a box somewhere, and you know, at the bottom, it usually says what religion you are, and I had some that said “N/A,” you know? N slash A. And I remember being really proud of that. And they always said—there’s a saying in the Army. They say, “There’s no atheists in a foxhole,” and I just used to sneer at that and be like, “No, I don’t believe in it at all.” To be honest, and the more I’ve thought about it, I wanted to be a Christian probably because of my family influence, but I remember wanting to believe that God existed, but I just couldn’t. It was like… I don’t know. It’s almost like working out, and you’re trying to get that last rep in of whatever you’re doing, and you just can’t do it. That was how I felt. I wanted to believe. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe in it. But that kind of takes me to the next step, was where—I guess there was something in me that felt like there was more to life? Because there was a time where I literally thought, “If I died today,” like I actually wasn’t even afraid of death, like I thought, “If I die today, it’ll just be like going to sleep.” I just won’t exist anymore, and for all eternity, that’s it. I’ll just be like being unconscious. But I don’t know. There must have just been something in me. I thought there must be more than this. So while I was in the military, I started researching other religions. And I read a lot of books. I read books on new age things, if I remember right. I know I read a lot of books on Buddhism and Hinduism. I remember the Bhagavad Gita was one of my favorites. I think I even read a little bit about Islam. I don’t know. I think I tried meditating a little bit here and there, but I always felt silly. The more I read about Hinduism, the less it made sense to me. But I did transition. I think it was for a couple of years I was an atheist, starting in high school, going into the military, but then I started leaning more towards agnosticism or at least being agnostic leaning towards atheism. After a while, I quit being so outspoken about God not existing and all that. I transitioned into a period where I was like, “Okay, I’m going to start looking into it and try to figure out what I think is true, and I’m not going to take a side on this right now, and I’m not going to try to talk people out of being Christians or religious.” So when you decided to start looking, though—because it sounds like you looked a lot of other directions than Christianity, so you were willing to look. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, but was it one of those “anything but Christianity” kind of searches at the beginning?  I think so. In the beginning, it definitely was. Because I had all these unanswered questions about Christianity, and I didn’t think anyone had the answers, so I began to assume that there were no answers, so that’s why I mainly went looking to other places first when I was trying to figure out… when I went on my “search for truth.” But just thinking about the catalyst that started the search, it was that you were looking for something more in life, because you must’ve—like you say, the death was the end. So you must’ve been thoughtful enough to understand the implications of your atheism, that there’s not much in the way of objective meaning and purpose, that there is no life after death, all of those things. Right. So you were thoughtful enough about your own worldview, the implications of your own worldview, that you saw that there was something missing, at least from a human perspective, that you wanted something more existentially in your life?  I think so. And I don’t want to say that I had completely thought out every angle of atheism or the implications for that on a comprehensive, logical, coherent worldview, but yes, I certainly had realized that, if God didn’t exist, which I didn’t think He did, that basically nothing mattered. And that if I died, nothing would happen. I would just cease to exist. And it’s funny, too, because you keep your living your life, and you keep going, and you have goals, but you tell yourself, “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, but I’m going to do it anyway.” So I don’t think I’d thought it completely through, but I definitely knew that, at least. But yeah, I think at the end of the day, though, I definitely knew there had to be something more than that. And so that’s why I did start looking for other—at least to see if maybe one of the other religions might be true, or there’s something in it that really struck me. So as you were looking through these other religions, it sounds as if you weren’t finding what you were looking for in terms of… I don’t know. Intellectual substance? Or meaning? Or whatever it is that you were searching for. Why don’t you tell me about that? Or what it led towards. If it led away from those? What it led towards?  It was Buddhism and Hinduism that really intrigued me the most. You know, there are several types of Buddhism. I was really into thinking about or wanting to try to practice the ones that are more meditative and more intellectual. I got into Hinduism, though, but yeah, when you try to read about, in some of the writings, how did the world begin and—oh! That reminds me of one of my major objections to Christianity. It was because of Genesis 1. I used to think that because Genesis 1 says that… Or let’s say this: It seems to say that the world was created before light was created. I used to say, “Yeah, it seems to obviously be saying that the world was created before the sun was created, but science says otherwise,” so that was another major objection I had. But you know, when you start reading in other religions, what they say the origin of the world is and kind of the purpose for why we’re here and all that, it really… I don’t know. It wasn’t satisfying, I don’t think, and I was trying to—I guess because of the way my mind works, I was trying to integrate it into what I was seeing in my everyday life, and I was trying to make sure that all the concepts lined up with each other. And it just wasn’t really clicking. And that really does kind of lead in to what I started doing next. So I got out of the military. I was still agnostic at this point. I got in in ’99, and I was in for 4-1/2 years. I think I got out around the beginning of 2004, and I came back to Lubbock, and I started going to Texas Tech University. At this time, I think that, because I didn’t find anything satisfying in these other religions, I started going to philosophy of religion. I specifically remember buying a book called Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, and philosophy of religion, it’s not completely… Philosophers of religion can be dabbling with just about any worldview. They can be theists. They can be pantheists. So I bought this book. I was like, “Well, I want to see what the philosophers have to say about all this.” I don’t know why I bought that specific book, but I saw in the table of contents that it talked about god of theism, it talked about pantheism and several others, I believe, and it had all these other things into it. And that really was a turning point for me. Another thing that was happening in my life, around the time, the last couple of years in the Army and some of those years going through college—and this leads up to my conversion—was I was having I think it’s called sleep paralysis. Have you talked to anybody that’s experienced that? Well, I think I know what you mean just from a personal experience, but why don’t you describe what it is, essentially?  Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, and I didn’t even know it was called something back then. But I would have these, and I call them dreams. I honestly don’t know what you would call it. Because it’s like a dream, but you’re in the exact place you’re in, and you’re in the exact position you’re in, but I would have something that—I didn’t know it would be a dream at first, right? So I’d just think I’m awake in bed, but in these “dreams,” I would notice that there was a dark figure standing in the room somewhere. And when you realize that there’s a dark figure standing in your room, you want to sit up and ask who it is or see what’s going on. But then at that point I would realize that my whole body was paralyzed and I couldn’t move. And obviously that’s a jarring experience, so I would realize that I couldn’t move, and then, for the next couple of seconds, I would try with all my might to move and I couldn’t, and the dark figure would still just be standing there over me, kind of across the room, never right over me, and then maybe a minute or so later, finally I could move because it’s because I just woke up. But I’m in the same place. It feels like I just woke up, but I’m in the same place. I’m in the same bed and position, but I just sat up, and I’m breathing real hard. And you know, whenever I’d wake up, there wouldn’t be anything there. But it was always so weird, and I had it occasionally. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest. It would happen, and I was like, “That’s weird.” I might tell somebody about it. I remember one time specifically I was on vacation from the Army, and I went hunting with my dad. We stayed the night at my grandma’s house in a small town in west Texas, and yeah, this one night. I slept on the couch that night, and I remember two people standing over me talking about me, just, “He’s doing this. He’s doing that. Blah, dah, dah, dah, dah,” and I wanted to sit up and be like, “Who is this in the living room?” because it was just me and him. I think my grandma and grandpa were out of town that night. But I couldn’t move, and I never saw who it was. When I finally was able to wake up, sit up, no one was there. So I just mention this because this was kind of happening alongside me looking through all these other religions, and I started to be more open to maybe taking another look at Christianity, or at least theism, because I didn’t find any of the other ones compelling or interesting after a while. Yeah, so Kyle, I imagine those experiences were quite frightening in some ways, I wonder. Did you consider that these figures—probably there was a palpable reality to them. Did it make you question whether or not there perhaps was something beyond the materialistic world? Something spiritual, perhaps? Maybe even a dark kind of spirituality?  I don’t think so. In the beginning and for several years, I thought they were just weird dreams. Okay.  Yeah. There was a specific example that happened that really jarred me, and that kind of leads up to my conversion, really the main part of my conversion story. Yes.  Oh, okay. So yeah… Okay, so I joined the Army for 4-1/2 years. When I got out, I joined the Texas National Guard. And I decided to stay in the Texas National Guard while I went to college at Texas Tech. I started school in 2004. What happened was it took me like six years to graduate from Texas Tech, but I went to school for less than four years out of that time because I got deployed to Iraq a couple times. So on this one specific deployment, in 2005—we were in southeastern Iraq. We were the Texas National Guard, and it wasn’t a super important mission or anything, but they had us basically stationed out in the middle of nowhere, just northwest of Kuwait. But we were at what is called a radio relay point out in the middle of the desert. And there were only like fifteen of us. Most of our time was just spent on guard duty, really, and maybe going out and helping truck drivers every once in a while. Now, leading up to this point, on this deployment, obviously it was really boring, because we were just doing guard duty, so I did a lot of reading. And I had ordered that philosophy of religion book, and I remember in that anthology there was an article titled “The Kalam Cosmological Argument” written by J.P. Moreland. And if your readers aren’t familiar with the Kalam cosmological argument, it’s a philosophical argument for God’s existence based off of the beginning of the world, right? And the argument says things that begin to exist have a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe has a cause. And I was reading that article by J.P. Moreland in this philosophy of religion anthology, and I just could not come up with an answer to this idea that there had to be a beginning to space and time. I tried. I came up with a few solutions, but it was so interesting because I just couldn’t come up with a satisfying solution. And it really started to hit me that I thought that there was a beginning to the universe, and if there was a beginning to the universe, I thought obviously it would follow that there had to be a God who made it begin. So I was struggling with this at this point. I was wrestling with the Kalam argument, and then one night in the guard tower… And like I said, I don’t know if these are dreams or not. Because it seems like you’re awake but then you go through this experience and then you kind of wake up from it. But I don’t know. So I’m on guard duty, and I thought I was just kind of sitting there, watching everything, and I started to hear someone come up this ladder. It’s not like a ladder. I don’t know what you would call it, but it’s these things that kind of stick out from the tower, so you grab onto those and step on those. And they were metallic, so it was a very distinct noise that someone would make if they would climb up the ladder. And oftentimes, some of my friends would come up and visit me, and would visit them. Or maybe my squad leader would come up and see how I was doing. So it wasn’t a big deal. It was a very common thing for someone to come up the ladder and see you. So I’m on guard duty. I hear someone come up. I don’t think much of it. But all of a sudden, when I could hear those footsteps and hands coming up that ladder to the top, this dark figure emerges. Oh!  And it really freaked me out. But I couldn’t move, you know? And then it stood there, and I couldn’t move, and then maybe a few seconds later I could move, and then it wasn’t there. So that really freaked me out for some reason. Way more than the other ones did when I was in bed. And that’s really the point where I started thinking that maybe there was something to this. And I started thinking about all the other times it happened. And I was wondering maybe that there’s some bad force out there that’s not happy with what I’m doing. And I think it was almost the next day—I don’t remember what it was. I think it was probably one of these camouflage Bibles that you have all over in the military. I think basically I took something like that and flipped to the back and looked for plan of salvation portion, you know? And I prayed the sinner’s prayer basically. And from then on, I definitely… I think that was the moment I was saved, but from then on, I definitely said I was a Christian. I never had someone to mentor me, so it took years before I finally started taking the Bible seriously, but I at least said I was a Christian. So if I’m listening to your correctly and kind of putting the pieces together, and I suppose, from intellectual point of view, you were reading J.P Moreland, the Kalam cosmological argument, that from, again, an intellectual point of view, you’re beginning to see that the beginning of the universe requires a sufficient cause outside of the material universe, and that God seems to be the best explanation for that, and so I guess, in some way, you began to become open, again intellectually, to the idea of at least a theistic god or someone, the Big Banger who caused the Big Bang, as the sufficient and necessary cause. And so I guess, once you made that step, it was almost as if these episodes, these sleep paralysis episodes and then the seeing of the dark figures, that prior to that you just dismissed them, but after that, it was enough for you to kind of—push you is probably too strong of a word. But it was enough of a frightening experience or a sobering experience that you were able to apprehend at least that maybe, if there is a God, then maybe there is an evil force? Or a dark force? That’s real. If God is real, then maybe there’s something else that’s real that’s not so good?  So it was through an interesting journeying, both experiential as well as intellectual, and then experiential again to bring you to a point of willingness, to where you actually looked at the Bible and looked at the back. And you were willing and really, it sounds like, very in earnest to accept God at that point.  Yes. And it’s funny, because I look back on it now, and I thought I was so smart back then, when I didn’t believe in it. But I honestly—since I’ve learned about evidence for Jesus’ resurrection in seminary, I realize that there are so many questions I actually didn’t ask. And I was surprised that I didn’t. I thought, “Well, why did I go back to Christianity so soon?” I wonder if some of it has to do with my upbringing, but a lot of was that I really—at that point, I thought that the Judeo-Christian view of demons and the devil was real, so the rest of it must also be real, and I needed to ask Jesus for help really soon so they wouldn’t get me. You know, an interesting thing is, ever since I prayed, I did do that sinner’s prayer and I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I haven’t had one of those sleep paralysis episodes with the dark figure standing over me. That’s interesting.  And since then, that’s been something that’s just really blowing me away. And I don’t know, maybe some people might think it’s completely psychological, but all I can say is that’s what I’ve experienced. Religious experience is difficult to get across to somebody, but that’s what I was seeing, and then I prayed to Jesus, and it has never happened to me again. In all these years. Yeah. I think that is a powerful testimony in its own way. Granted, it is your own experience, but it is a very convincing experience for you. I can listen to the skeptic who may be listening and saying, “Oh, he was just imagining Or, “He just got scared or something, and he just believed,” but I have a feeling that you, as a thoughtful person, like you said earlier in your story. You wanted to believe, but you didn’t think that there was enough compelling evidence for you to believe.  Right. But at this point in your life, you didn’t want to believe, but you were searching and then found something compelling, both intellectually and experientially. Once you accepted Christ and  you were able to, I guess, look at the doubts and the hard questions through different eyes, I guess you could say, were you able to make sense intellectually of all of those questions that you had before? Was this new worldview philosophically—as a philosopher, as a thinker, was it something that gave you meaning and hope beyond death? But more than, from a human perspective, was it something that made sense of reality as a whole? Both what you were thinking about, say cosmologically with the origins of the universe for example, as well as in  your own humanity that the Christian worldview seemed to put the pieces together? How did that work? I mean you came a long way from just agreeing or praying the sinner’s prayer, the plan of salvation, to now being a PhD philosophy professor. There must have been something quite convincing to you beyond mere experience.  Oh, yes. For sure. Now, you know, the rest of the story, there’s a lot of grace, a lot of providence I think. That’s what I think is so amazing, you know? And I still don’t think I went and talked to my family and asked them hard questions, but it was a slow process. After I became a Christian, I think I started reading the Bible a little bit. Never read it all the way through. I started praying. But not really going to church. When I was an undergrad, I joined a social fraternity, and we had a GPA requirement, but to be honest, most of the guys in my fraternity joined so we could go to parties. So I was drinking a lot back then, and looking back, sometimes I wonder if I was drinking a lot because of some of my experiences in the military, but I didn’t have… I basically came to Christ because of a book and the Holy Spirit. So I didn’t have someone guiding me through all this. What I think was a turning point for me was when I met my wife. At this point, I was surrounded by people who drank, and that’s all I did. But then I met her. And we started dating. She didn’t drink, and really, it was interesting to me, because when we would talk or hang out, I realized that you can have fun without drinking, basically. But also she was someone—because I was wanting to date her. She didn’t tell me not to drink, but she’s just one of those people. She was definitely a mature Christian. And she’s just one of those people that you just want to act better around, you know? You just want to be a better person around them. So I wouldn’t drink around her, and we got serious really quick. We both met in our late twenties. We were both looking for something serious. And we got married within a year of knowing each other, and she was just this lifeline to a world where I wasn’t surrounded by people drinking. And like I said, she was a mature Christian. She started getting me in church. I started reading the Bible more. But also, one day, we had this conversation asking each other what we would do if we had a billion dollars. And she asked me what I would do, and I said, “Well, I would go back to school and learn all this stuff I’ve always wanted to learn about. I hear these things in the sermons, and I understand it for the most part, but I want to know the why of it all. I want to know how this is even possible,” so she actually talked me into following my dream. At first I thought I would just get some high paying job, or hopefully a high paying job, and work my way to retirement, so I could go back to school, but she talked me into going to seminary just right up front and then hopefully doing something like that as a career. So I did. And I went to Southern Evangelical Seminary, started going in 2014. She laughed because I was so excited I was ordering books on Amazon for my classes when we were on our honeymoon. Besides my wife’s sanctifying influence on my life, going to SES was great for me. I was required to read through the Bible in the Bible survey courses. It was the first time I’d read through the whole thing. But I knew that I wanted to learn about philosophy. I wanted to learn about why Christianity is true, I also wanted a place that was grounded in the Bible and seemed to be pretty orthodox and conservative. So I went there, and that was what was kind of an eye opener to me, is when I started learning about all of these philosophical arguments for God’s existence that I hadn’t even considered, when I started learning about the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, when I started learning about all philosophical arguments for the existence of the soul and all these arguments against atheism. Well, some of the stuff on Jesus’ resurrection surprised me because I thought back and I thought, “You know, I didn’t even ask these questions, but there’s all of these answers and all this evidence for Jesus’ life and all these answers to objections from skeptics,” and I hadn’t even considered that. But I think it really had a lot to do with me thinking that demons were real. But at this point in time in my life, I’ve seen so much. For one, it does make sense out of pretty much all of reality, the Christian worldview does. Whether it’s the beginning of the universe or us always seeking some kind of good, whether we believe that God exists or not, our rationality, our sense of right and wrong. But I’ve seen so much evidence for Christianity at this point that I just… It would take more faith for me to be an atheist. I tell people if they dug up Jesus’ body tomorrow, and they were able to somehow conclude conclusively that Christianity is false, I still would be at least a theist. I’d be confused, but all the evidence for God’s existence, philosophical and scientific evidence that kind of helps confirm that, I just… At this point, I’m so convinced that there is a God, and of course, with all this evidence for Jesus’ resurrection and all the evidence for the reliability of the Bible, I just think that Christianity stands alone as the true religion. And that everybody needs to take a good, hard look at their life and a good, hard look at the evidence and make a decision. You know, sometimes, despite all the evidence that seems extremely obvious to those who’ve studied the evidence for a long time on a Christian perspective, oftentimes the skeptic will say there is no evidence for God. How would you respond to that, especially in light of what you just said, that there seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence?  It reminds me of me back whenever I was in that position. Because there were so many books written on apologetics before 1999. It blows me away how many people were speaking and writing about the truth of Christianity at that point, and I had no idea about it. But I have journal entry assignments in my classes at work, in my philosophy class, and we get to a philosophy of religion portion of the class, and students are asked to write about their opinions and their thought on whether God exists, and I’ve had several students say things to that effect. “There’s absolutely no evidence for God’s existence,” and it always puzzles me, because in these debates on whether God exists or not, the theist is saying that the entire universe is evidence for God’s existence. Basically, to me, when someone says that, it would be like someone being in a murder case and the prosecutor has provided a lot of evidence, pointing… maybe circumstantial, but pointing to the guilt of the offender, but then one of the people on the jury says—they don’t think he did it, but they wouldn’t say, “There’s absolutely no evidence for it,” right? They would just say, “I don’t think this evidence means that he murdered that person.” So if someone says, “There’s absolutely no evidence for God’s existence,” I think either they don’t know about all of these philosophical, logical, scientific arguments that Western philosophers and theists have been making for thousands of years, or what they really mean is, “The evidence doesn’t convince me.” So that’s what I would say to somebody. If you think there is no evidence, then you need to start reading up on apologetics. If you’re really interested in this topic and you’re really searching for truth, there are a lot of books that provide logical, evidential reasons for believing that God exists and that Jesus rose from the dead. Yeah. I think that might be a little bit key there, in terms of either they are not convinced or they haven’t been exposed, but what you said there is if they’re really looking. And I think that has a lot to say about all of us, in terms of what we’re looking for. We have a tendency to see what we seek, and so sometimes our desires prevent us from seeing perhaps what is true.  Yeah. if I had any more, other advice to a nonbeliever who was seeking in some sense of the word, I just think of my younger self, really. That’s one of the reasons kind of why I do it. One reason why I’m a philosopher is because I’ve always just thought about these hard questions. And I really was one of those people at work daydreaming about, “Does God exist?” and all these things. But thinking about my younger self, I had all of these objections to Christianity, but like I said earlier, the more I learned about systematic theology, the more I learned about philosophy and all these Christian ideas that the church fathers and all the major leaders of the church in the medieval and modern and ancient period have argued for over thousands of years and the more I understood what Christianity really means, the more I realized that all of these objections I had to Christianity early on weren’t objections to Christianity, because I was basically… I had these straw man ideas about it, and I didn’t believe in something that wasn’t even Christianity. So I know it sounds crazy, but I almost wonder how many atheists or people who once were Christian or have never been Christian, but if they would just sit down with an open mind with someone who knows what they’re talking about and have them explain it to them, I wonder how many would find it more compelling. Another thing is that I was asking all these questions, but no one had the answers, but the more I’ve thought about it, I tell people… Let’s say that I wanted to know about something, some really deep scientific concept, so I want to learn about relativity theory, and the only people I ask about relativity theory are my family members, who aren’t scientists, or my high school teacher. And none of them can explain it really well to me, and in fact, when they do explain what they do grasp, it doesn’t sound right. But the thing is I wouldn’t reject relativity theory based off of just asking my friends and my high school teacher. I would need to go to a professor, a PhD in it. And in the same way… I’m not saying that someone has to have a PhD to understand what Christianity is. I’m just saying that, if someone has asked their parents and a few other people and maybe their pastor, who hasn’t been taught apologetics maybe, and those people don’t have the answer, that’s not good reason for rejecting Christianity. You need to go to theologians. You need to read systematic theology, read some philosophy, read some works of apologetics, because those are going to be written by people who know what they’re talking about, and there is a lot of material out there on this stuff. If you had a chance to recommend one book, say someone said, “I really would like to read something substantive from a Christian writer, philosopher, theologian,” can you think of a book that you might recommend for someone to pick up?  Yes. The book I usually recommend is a book by William Lane Craig. It’s called On Guard, Student’s Edition, so it’s written by a Christian philosopher and apologist, written with an unbelieving audience in mind, and he covers a lot of ground in that book. He covers the meaning of life, whether or not God exists. He presents several arguments for God’s existence, and then he moves into the resurrection of Jesus and presents all of the historical evidence for Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. And that’s one of my favorites. It’s written for a beginning audience, so I think it’s pretty easy to understand for beginners. And that’s one of my favorites to recommend to people. Yeah. That’s excellent. And for the Christian, how would you recommend them to really consider talking with those who were as you once were, are engaging with those who don’t believe or the skeptic?  Yeah. So as an apologist and a philosopher, obviously I put a lot of stock in and emphasize 1 Peter 3:15, that says that everyone needs to give a reason for the hope that is in them when they’re asked. I think obviously different Christians are gifted with different gifts, right? And I don’t think that everyone is going to be gifted in a way that they’re going to be interested in apologetics. I know many people who just know Christianity is true, and they don’t really have to dig into the evidence. They just know it’s true. And honestly, I think that’s okay. But I would say that everyone needs to at least know a little bit of good theology. Try to learn a little bit more about why they believe what they believe, whether it’s learning a little bit of basic systematic theology but also maybe reading at least one book on apologetics and looking at the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection and God’s existence, in the very least that you could point someone to that. You know, since I became a believer, I’ve discovered that there are a good handful of people like me who needed to see evidence that it was true before they got on board, but I’ve also discovered that, in churches, there’s a lot of people who aren’t into that, and I’ve seen some Christians who were actually… They’re against apologetics in some sense, whether they think it’s just kind of a waste of time or they think it’s not very pious to say that you have to defend the truth of Christianity, and so yeah… For one, I think when engaging with nonbelievers, we need to at least know a little bit about what we believe so you can point nonbelievers who do want to see evidence to these resources, but also, as believers, we need to realize that not everybody has the same experience we do. Because I’ve had some people say that we shouldn’t do apologetics because it doesn’t work. But I’m living proof that it does work. I know there were some experiential things going on with my conversion, but also a huge part of that was through philosophy and through apologetics and me being—one day I wasn’t convinced that God existed. The next day I read a philosophical argument, and I was convinced that there was a beginning to the universe and God had to be the cause of that. So I would just tell people that apologetics is okay. And God can and does use it to bring people to the Kingdom of God, so to have an open mind about it, and just because someone else is…. We’re not all gifted with the same gifts, so it’s okay for other people to do it, whether you’re interested in it or not. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that. Apologetics is something I think both you and I hold close to our hearts. I have, as you have, seen the value of it, especially in a world increasingly skeptical about Christianity and its truths.  Yes. So it’s good to know why we believe, what we believe, and all of these grounding arguments for it that are really, really quite substantive when you take look at them. I think, too, I love your story and what you’re saying because I also believe that, just as you had constructed straw men and arguments to take Christianity down, I think there’s oftentimes a misconception of what Christianity is and who Christians are, and oftentimes, we’re given a very negative stereotype, and one of those stereotypes is that we’re not intelligent people. And I think your story really counters that, your journey really counters that. You’re a thoughtful, intelligent person. You have asked questions since you were a boy, and into your adulthood, you’re spending your life still considering the big questions of life in a very thoughtful, intellectual way, not only for yourself but for college students and high school students as well. And that’s pretty wonderful, that you’ve gone through this whole journey in your life, both intellectual, as well as experiential, and spiritual of course, and that you’ve found the worldview that seems to make the most sense of reality, but you’re not keeping it to yourself. You’re sharing that with others.  And that’s why I’m so happy that you’re on the podcast today, Kyle. Because I’m thinking about those who are going to be listening to your story and really benefit from your journey, so thank you for coming on board today.  Thank you so much for having me, Jana. It’s been wonderful.  Thanks for tuning in to to hear Kyle’s story. You can find out more about him with the links in the episode notes, as well as the book On Guard that he recommended by William Lane Craig. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you’ll subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. It’s always great, too, if you give it a good rating. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be see how someone else, another skeptic, flips the record of their life.

Former skeptic Adrienne Johnson embraced anything but God in her life until her drive to discover truth led her to belief. Resources Prager U, Stories of Us, Adrienne Johnson: Why I’m No Longer an Atheist https://www.prageru.com/video/stories-of-us-adrienne-johnson Max McLean, Fellowship for Performing Arts, https://fpatheatre.com C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity Learn more about the C.S. Lewis Institute Fellows Program at https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/Fellows_Program Visit www.sidebstories.com to explore more resources and stories of atheist conversions to Christianity. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who, against all odds, became a Christian. Everyone is different. Every story is different. Everyone has and holds beliefs, yes, based upon intellectual reasons, but it’s usually more than that. We all have good and bad experiences, influences, emotions, desires, and disappointments. We have people in our lives that shape our expectations and thinking about what we should believe to be true or good or real. We are complex and complicated, but oh, so interesting. Every story of an atheist moving from disbelief to belief is nothing short of fascinating. This huge paradigm shift occurs not merely in the mind of someone in their expressed beliefs, but it also affects an enormous transformation of life and living. After all, what we believe dramatically effects how we behave, how we see and live life, or at least it should. If not, your beliefs are essentially meaningless.  But when you see a remarkable shift in someone’s life, it causes us all to look more closely at what happened, to step in. One thing I can say from listening to story after story of conversion from atheism to belief in Jesus Christ is that an extraordinary change occurs, an exchange of life so undeniable that it captures the attention of all who’ve observed the before and after, so to speak. We stop in our tracks, and we want to know why and how it happened. What was so profound that turned someone from resolutely walking one way to changing course to a nearly opposite way of thinking and living?  Today, we’re going to hear another one of those incredible stories. As an atheist, Adrienne Johnson couldn’t remotely conceive of God as a possible reality, much less anyone she wanted in her life. Now, she can’t imagine life without Him. I hope you’ll come and listen to her story and be encouraged by her courage, inspired by her change of belief and change of life.  Welcome to the Side B, Adrienne. It’s so great to have you with me today!  Thank you so much for having me. So, my name is Adrienne Johnson. I’m the chief of staff at PragerU. And we have a series called Stories of Us that features Americans from every walk of life and their amazing stories of transformation. We recently released an episode featuring me and my story, about how I was a lifelong atheist. In fact, I was a chain smoking, tattoo covered, sexually promiscuous, suicidally depressed atheist that was transformed by Jesus. Wow. You have set the stage for us, Adrienne! I’m so intrigued to find out your story. Obviously, you’ve come a long way. Transformation is probably the right word to use for your story. So let’s start at the beginning of your story. Tell me about your childhood, where you grew up, your culture. And was there God in the picture? Did your family have any beliefs? Just start us there.  Sure. So I grew up in Santa Monica, California. I grew up with two very loving secular parents. We really didn’t have any religion in the home. We didn’t have a whole lot of moral structure or guidelines, and my dad was basically an atheist. My mom was sort of a New Age hippie, and any time that I was exposed to any kind of religion or spirituality, I rejected it, even at a very, very young age. I thought it was all make believe and fairy tales. It didn’t make sense to me. It wasn’t logical. I was a very rational, logical child. In fact, when I was about four years old, I came to my dad, and I was so earnest, and I said, “Dad, I just want you to tell me the truth. Okay? Just be honest with me. Is Santa Claus real?” And he was so taken aback by my directness that he said, “No, he’s not,” and I was relieved, because, to me, that whole thing didn’t make sense. How could one person fly all over the world in one night? So even as a little four year old, I wanted everything to be rational and make sense, and when I heard things about Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark and the parting of the Red Sea, it just sounded like Santa Claus to me. It just sounded like fairy tales, and so I rejected it, and we really didn’t have any kind of religion or spirituality in the home? Did you ever talk about religion or belief with your father and his atheism? Did you have any discussion? Or did you just come to this conclusion on your own?  A little bit later, when I was in college—high school, college—my dad and I would talk about… That was really when I started coming into my own with my intellectual thinking, and we would have philosophical discussions about history. And I remember him telling me things about The Selfish Gene, which was a book that was written by a prominent atheist. I don’t know if it was Richard Dawkins or someone else, yeah, and he was saying how the only reason humans exist is because we’re really good hosts for DNA and that sort of sums up our entire existence. I guess I was a college student maybe at the time, and I thought, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” And I remember saying to my dad in the car—I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, and so we would drive back and forth often. I would go home on the weekends and then drive back to college, and so my dad and I would spend time together in the car, talking about the world and economics and politics and philosophy and all of these things that I was just starting to learn about as a young woman. And I remember saying to him once, “Religion is something that man created back in the ancient times, when we needed purpose and reason and something to make sense of the world, and now we don’t need it any more, but it’s this ancient holdover that we still have. And one day we’ll be rid of it. We’re just sort of in the middle transition phase right now.” And I really believed that, and in fact, when I was in college, I was an adamant atheist, like an angry, cynical, hard, harsh atheist. And any time I was exposed to religion or spirituality, I was very hostile toward it. What do you think informed that contempt?  That’s a good question. I mean, now I have sort of my own opinion about it, which is that there is so much truth and power to God and Jesus, that it is so offensive to people who don’t believe. I suppose there are some atheists or some agnostics who just sort of shrug and say, “Oh, I don’t really believe anything,” or, “I don’t care what other people believe,” but I know from my personal experience, it was incredibly offensive, and now I think—it’s sort of like when you’re in the dark and you are exposed to the light, and it’s so harsh and blinding. It’s very hard to be indifferent toward it. You either can accept it or you reject it, and you have to fight it, because it is so offensive to your worldview and who you are, and that was how I felt. So as you were growing up, you obviously had this very pragmatic view of life, but you observed your mother practicing some form of spirituality. What did you think that was? Obviously, she believed it, or did she talk with you about her New Age beliefs?  A little bit. I mean I was definitely exposed to it. I definitely saw it. I don’t think we discussed it that much. I was sort of more in line with my father, who was very intellectual, very cerebral, and we would have these discussions, but I saw my mother dabbling in all of these different sort of New Age spiritual practices, especially in Los Angeles. She would go to these different organizations, different… I guess you would call them churches but sort of New Age versions of churches or spiritual centers. There was definitely a seeking about her my entire life that I witnessed. She’s always looking for something to make her happy, make her whole, make her complete. And I didn’t quite understand this as a child, but it seems to me that she’s always been sort of seeking for something. And I was intrigued. She would have a room in the house with her paints and her canvases when I was a child, and she also had dream catchers and rain sticks and crystals. And I was very interested in that stuff, probably just because it was my mom’s. It was like “my mom’s neat stuff,” “my mom’s neat room,” that I thought was interesting. But it didn’t have any meaning. It didn’t have any spiritual meaning to me. During that time as you were growing up as well, I know you’re in LA. Especially, you’re young enough that there were some forms of Christianity around you. Did you ever have any touch points with those? Any people who called themselves Christians in any kind of orthodox sense?  I love that question because Christianity is actually such a huge part of our culture. It’s very easy to be exposed to things around Christianity, and I was, and yet it never penetrated. For example, I didn’t really have Christians in my life. I didn’t have Christian friends or Christian family, but I was very much exposed to it with things even like Christmas cartoons. I loved Christmas cartoons. I loved the Charlie Brown Christmas special, Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown, and in it, Linus quotes Luke. He quotes several verses of Luke, and I must have seen that cartoon a hundred times as a child, and so I even probably had some of it memorized, but if you asked me what it meant, I would have no idea. Hearing terms like the Son of God, died for our sins, Jesus is Savior, you know I heard things like that because it’s part of our culture, but I didn’t know what any of that meant. I certainly never, ever knew that Jesus was God. No one ever said that to me, explained that to me. I thought He was a special person in the Christian faith. I didn’t really understand who He was or what Son of God or Son of Man meant. But it is really interesting that you could grow up in America, and even in Los Angeles, and be exposed to parts of Christian culture and still never hear the gospel, never really know what it means, and that was my experience. So as you were moving along and you were becoming this adamant atheist. I like the way that you say that. There’s a certain worldview that that entails. Atheism itself, atheists would say, is not a worldview, but there are certain worldview implications to that, where you’re embracing, whether it be naturalism or materialism, those kind of worldviews where the natural world is all that exists, or the material world, that there is no supernatural world. Were you, as an intellectual person, aware of the implications and what those worldviews entailed in terms of meaning and purpose and value or free will or consciousness or those kinds of things that go along with embracing those kinds of ways of thinking?  I think it all made sense to me at the time. At the time, it was the most rational, cohesive worldview that I saw out there. It definitely made the most sense. And I actually found comfort in things like, “We are a speck of dust hurtling through an infinite, vast universe with no meaning and no purpose. There’s no explanation. We don’t know why we’re here, how we’re here. We can never know. We will never know. We can just sort of throw our hands up and say, ‘It just is.’ It just is, and it’s all random, and there’s no meaning to any of it,” and somehow, when I was a young person, maybe in my early twenties, that was enough for me. And it brought me some weird sense of comfort. I think it came from an intellectual arrogance in a way. I really thought that I knew best and I knew more than other people. I definitely held myself above others, and I think maybe that’s part of being a young twenty-something. I thought I knew. I had it all figured out. I understand. I understand the way the world works, the way the universe works, and I don’t need meaning or purpose, and I thought that that served me just fine, but unfortunately it left a huge, huge void in my heart, in my life, and I was trying to fill that void with other things. Now if you had told me that at the time, I would’ve said, “Screw you. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and I wouldn’t have believed it, but now, of course, looking back on it, I can see how that meaninglessness really affected me and left me thirsty, wanting more, and then very painfully trying to fill that void with things that could never and would never fill it. You say you have a God shaped… or a void in your life that you were trying to fill. So in a sense, your intellectual beliefs were having an existential kind of connection to your life, the way you were living it out. You were searching because, I suppose, if there is a God in the picture, there is a sense of source of meaning and purpose and value and identity. But without that, on your own, did you feel a sense of kind of grappling or grasping for, “What is life all about?” “How do I make sense of life?” I presume, based upon your introduction, that it was affecting your choices.  100%. And that started at a very young age. That started at age twelve. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen is when I started trying… Now, I didn’t realize I was trying to fill this void, but that is what I was doing. Because I wasn’t comfortable in myself. I didn’t have confidence just because I am me and I am human and I exist. I needed approval and affirmation, this feeling of really wanting to be good enough and wanting to be liked and wanting to be popular and wanting to be cool. And that meant, at the time, being a twelve, thirteen year old, middle school student in southern California, that I would start drinking and smoking and doing drugs and being sexual with boys because that’s what the cool kids did and that’s how you get approval and affirmation and how you feel good about yourself and how you build confidence, is by being a cool kid. So I really went at that full force. And I enjoyed a lot of it. I had some fun. But I also really damaged myself. And I also did things that I didn’t really want to do, but it was more important to appear a certain way, to look a certain way, to do certain acts, than to say things like, “I don’t want to do that.” “I don’t like that.” “Please stop.” As a thirteen, fourteen year old girl, I basically gave in to things that I didn’t really want to do because I thought it would somehow benefit me or elevate my status. And it’s just pretty heartbreaking to think about, that that’s what I was doing at such a young age because I didn’t have a better sense of self and love and acceptance, even though I was in a loving family. My parents adored me. They gave me a lot of praise. I still was seeking and longing for something else. The only thing that I can make sense of now is that there was something that was lacking that I was trying to fill with those other things. So you’re going through adolescence. You get to college. You’ve become quite hardened against the idea of God, and I presume organized religion and Christianity. Why don’t you take us to that place and walk us forward from there?  Okay. So it’s funny. I remember—you bring up this memory when I was in college, and I was very much the way you describe. I was at a coffee shop, and this sweet older man started talking to me and my girlfriends. We were there studying for class or whatever. And I thought he was just so pleasant, and I was so surprised that this nice older man would just strike up a conversation and start talking to us, and then maybe about five or ten minutes in, he dropped the, “Well, I just want to tell you that Jesus loves you,” and I don’t remember the exact words he used, but it was basically—he was being so kind and generous, and the reason he was doing that was because of Jesus. Because he loves Jesus, and Jesus loves him, and Jesus commands him to love others, and he just wants to spread Jesus’s love to us. I was livid. You could see the smoke coming out of my ears. I thought, “How dare you?” I didn’t say this to him. I just got very cold and turned a cold shoulder. But I was so offended. “How dare you pull this bait and switch on me? Here you are pretending to be this nice man talking to me, and then you drop the Jesus!” And I was so offended. I wish I could somehow tell that man what has happened to me since. And maybe there was a seed that was planted there. Maybe all along the way, all along my life, there have been seeds that have been planted, even though I was very clenched and very hardened to them. Only God knows what those little interactions and encounters have done to me throughout my life. So God bless that man! Yes. For having that conversation with me. I wish I could tell him what’s happened to me since. College, I basically came out of college. I felt the whole way through college. I was still constantly trying to fill this void. I mostly did that through relationships, jumping from one relationship to another. I was pretty much never faithful in my relationships because my relationships couldn’t satisfy me. I would get into a relationship, and then it still wouldn’t make me happy, so then I would need to find another person that would make me happy. If I wasn’t in a relationship, I was engaged in a lot of one-night stands, being sexually promiscuous, again trying to get that attention and approval and affirmation from other people. It felt good in the moment and then would quickly wear off and not last very long. I met my ex-husband when I was, I think, 22. I was very young, and we were in graduate school and dated for a few years. We thought it was very romantic to be sort of these tortured artists who had a lot of emotions and a lot of pain and a lot of struggles, and we were very intellectual, and we wrote poetry. I thought that that was really beautiful and romantic at the time. And I thought that, by us getting married, that that would make me happy and make me whole, even though I had been unfaithful while we were dating, and he warned me and said, “If you ever do this to me again, I will leave you. I cannot let you do this to me again.” And I said, “I won’t do it again,” and at the time, I would mean it. I would cry and say, “Of course. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it again.” He married me, and very shortly after our marriage, I really plunged into the depths of depression. I started struggling with depression shortly after college. I was in my early twenties when I first had my real first bout of depression, of feeling completely meaningless, wanting to end my life, needing to get help, starting to see a therapist, see a psychiatrist, get on medication, and that went on for many, many years. It would kind of ebb and flow. I would have some good periods and then bad periods, and shortly after we got married, I went into a pretty deep, dark depression, where it was very hard to get out of bed on a daily basis. I couldn’t really find meaning in anything. I really just wanted to end my life. I would fantasize about killing myself all the time. It was a terrible, tortured place to live in, and my poor ex-husband was right there alongside me for all of it, and I certainly was not a pleasant person to be around for all of that time. And then eventually… I couldn’t stay in that place. It was unsustainable, being that depressed and that far gone and wanting to kill myself, so I really think I had three options at the time. One was that I could get healthy, which my ex-husband was begging me to do, which I honestly had no interest in whatsoever. Really taking responsibility for myself and making a change and saying, “I’m going to get healthy.” No, thank you. The second option was to kill myself, which I really thought about doing all the time. And the third option was to act out and to blow up my life and to totally go crazy and just burn it all to the ground, which is the choice that I opted for. So I was unfaithful in my marriage. I just created a lot of chaos. At this time, it felt like needing to escape from this prison that I was in, which was really a self-imposed, self-induced prison, so that’s what I did. I was unfaithful, and my ex-husband and I had a business together. I completely blew all of that up. And my ex-husband, after many months of really trying to work things out and wanting me to get healthy, said, “I told you. I can’t let you do this to me anymore, and I’m leaving you.” So he left me, and that’s when I really, really hit rock bottom, and that was when I finally made a change. Yes. Tell us about that. It sounds like you were in a really, really hard place.  It was awful. It was. I mean hitting rock bottom was so terrible, but the one good thing about rock bottom is that it finally got me to admit that I needed help, and that I needed to do something different. I had basically been doing the same thing for many, many, many years, and even though I was in therapy for years and on medication for years, I was stuck in this cycle, and it just got progressively worse over time. Every time I was unfaithful, the stakes were higher, and I caused more damage. Every single time. And I kept doing it. With the same result. And finally when I hit bottom, I said, “I have to do something different.” So I basically crawled in on my hands and knees to these meetings, these support groups for people struggling with sex and love addiction. I was incredibly ashamed. I was now approaching thirty, I was going to be divorced, and I was going to these support groups for people struggling with sex and love addiction. This was not in the plan. This was not the life I was supposed to lead. And I would go into these groups, and I would just sob. I would just cry the entire time, and I was so angry and so hurt and so broken. But I was also so desperate that I was willing to try basically anything. And so in these groups they said, “You have to get some kind of spiritual practice. You have to have some kind of higher power.” I don’t care what it is. It doesn’t matter. Try a bunch of different stuff. Try New Age stuff. Try Buddhist stuff. Try Jewish stuff. Try Christian stuff. Whatever. You know? And so I did. As uncomfortable as it made me. I mean, you’re telling an atheist to pray to a god that she doesn’t believe in. This is ridiculous. Right.  But fine. “I’ll just do whatever you tell me.” So when I first started… I couldn’t even pray out loud. It was so embarrassing. Even when I was alone in my apartment or in my car, I would turn all hot and red, and I couldn’t bring myself to say anything out loud. And then finally I started, at the direction of my mentor, I started saying, “This is stupid, and there’s no one here, and I’m only talking to myself, and I’m doing this just because I was told to.” And that is how my prayer life began. That’s how I started praying. My prayer life now is really different, but that was how it started. That was honest. That was honest.  Yeah. It was very honest. Yes.  So, for months, I was going to these groups, and I was trying all this different spiritual stuff. I would try basically anything and everything that was presented to me. Now, being in Los Angeles, there was a lot of New Age type stuff that I tried. I went to some churches with some friends. I went to synagogue. I tried Kundalini yoga. I tried Buddhist chanting. I tried Sufi healings. I was basically open to anything and everything, and the more I did this God stuff, the more I saw it having a positive effect on me. It was very uncomfortable to go through it, but I could see that it was starting to affect me. I was still in a great deal of pain. I was still crying on a daily basis, but for the first time in my life, I wasn’t acting out. I wasn’t doing the unhealthy behavior that I had done for so many years. I was doing something different. I was spending time with healthy people, journaling, praying, meditating, writing, being alone for the first time in my whole life, and it was a very, very painful process, but it got me to a really seeking place. I sort of became a spiritual seeker, but then it became clear to me that I didn’t want to just be a spiritual seeker. I wanted to be a spiritual finder. I wanted to find it. I wanted to find the truth. And it was after going through that whole experience—the timing was just amazing—that a friend of mine invited me to a play of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, and I had never heard of it. I didn’t know what it was, but I loved theatre, and I just thought it would be a fun thing to do with my friend, so I said, “Sure, I’ll go with you to see this play.” And so we go, and it completely, completely changed my life. Yeah. That’s a powerful production of Max McLean. It’s a very sobering production. For the listeners, can you tell what The Screwtape Letters is? Tell us what that is and what is based on?  Absolutely! Yeah. So I go to the theatre, and I open the program to see, “Oh, what is this play about?” and it says who the characters are, and it says God and the devil, and I was like, “What?” Like, “What is this play? What am I about to watch?” And it turns out that it’s essentially this production with Max McLean that was put on by Fellowship for Performing Arts. It’s like a 90-minute monologue essentially, where Max McLean plays Screwtape. Screwtape is sort of a high-ranking demon official in the underworld, and throughout the play, he’s writing letters to his apprentice, to his nephew, named Wormwood, who’s sort of a junior demon. And he’s teaching Wormwood, this junior demon, how to be a proper demon and how to properly torment his patient, which is a human. And so the book and the play are sort of that idea that you see in popular culture, when there’s like a little angel on your shoulder and a little devil on your shoulder. It’s like, “Oh, that’s a real thing!” The whole concept of these little devils do exist, and they do torment you, and they do plant lies and deceptions into your thinking, and so the whole play is really about spiritual warfare, spiritual attack, about these dark forces that want to keep us hurting, doubting, alone, separated from God, and even comfortable. They want to keep us comfortable and separated from God, right? And so I’m watching this play, and it’s like watching a mirror. Some of the things that Screwtape is saying about how the demons torment the patient is just… it’s what I had been living for so many years, for so long. It felt so true. It just resonated so deeply within me. And for the first time in my life, this thought occurred to me. And I always saw myself as messed up, like there’s something wrong with me. I’m tortured, and I’m this, and I’m that, and it was the very first time in my life that it occurred to me, “Maybe that’s not me. Maybe there is a dark force that is doing that to me, and that’s not actually who I am.” And that, “God actually wants me to be pure and happy, like truly connected to him, and full of joy, and there’s this dark force that doesn’t want that for me.” And it just really blew my mind and opened up my eyes, especially after I had been on this year-long spiritual journey of trying all these different things, and then I see this play. It just completely shattered me. Now, considering Christianity as an atheist was ridiculous and extremely uncomfortable, but I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, as I had been doing for an entire year, sort of just taking the next right action and doing the next right thing. I actually ended up reaching out to Fellowship for the Performing Arts to let them know what an effect they had on me, and Max McLean himself said that he was so moved by my reaching out to them, and he actually even became a spiritual mentor of mine because of this whole interaction. Wow! That’s amazing!  Yeah. Max is absolutely fantastic, and he has literally watched me transform from being a very broken, not even a Christian. I mean, when I first started talking to him, I was still just a seeker. I was still just sort of curious and interested and still very, very broken and hurting. And then God was so amazing in this time because He kept putting person after person in front of me. My friend who took me to the play, she actually was somebody who had not been a Christian who then became Christian and actually became Catholic, and so I said, “That’s crazy! That’s a crazy story. Can I talk to you about that sometime?” And I went over to her house, and we ordered Thai food, and we stayed up until 1:00 in the morning talking about Jesus, and I was crawling out of my skin, and it made me incredibly uncomfortable, but there was something about it that felt right. It felt like truth. It felt like a bell ringing within me, like I was being covered in water, you know what I mean? And then she introduced me to someone else. And God just kept putting all these people in front of me, and every time I talked to someone, I went to coffee with someone, I read this book, it was like God was wooing me, you know? He was pulling me, lovingly, gently closer and closer to Himself. And I just kept exploring Christianity, and one morning, I was getting ready for work. This is probably now a few months in to exploring Christianity, and this thought occurred to me. I was listening to Christian worship music, getting ready for work, and this thought occurred to me that, if somebody asked me, “Are you a Christian?” I would have to say yes at this point. It wasn’t just like a moment. It wasn’t like a white light, road to Damascus moment for me. It was a gradual transition, and I became a Christian. And after that, I found a church that became my home church. I got baptized. And that is church where I met my husband, my current husband, my new husband, who’s also a Christian and who loves Jesus more than he loves me. That’s an amazing transformation! And it all started with The Screwtape Letters. Of course, C.S. Lewis himself was a former atheist, so he, in writing that narrative, understands the struggle. Not only in becoming a Christian but also in the Christian life still. There’s struggle. But through that process, as you talk about your exploring. You were reading books, and I presume that you opened the Bible, maybe for the first time.  Yes. As a former atheist who probably had never even been exposed to the Bible, what were your thoughts when you started reading it? As an atheist, what did you think the Bible was? And then I’m curious the perspective of when you actually opened it and read it for yourself, the first time or thereafter.  Yeah. That’s a really great question. I certainly did not read the Bible before then. I had no interest in reading the Bible. So after I saw The Screwtape Letters, and God kept putting all these different people in my path, one of the people He put in my path was a pastor psychologist who was in Chicago who very, very graciously offered to talk to me, sort of counsel me, once a week if I wanted to. And my initial reaction when that was offered to me, it was offered by my friend who took me to the play. I really wanted to say, “No, that’s okay. No thanks, I’m not interested in talking to a pastor once a week,” but it was so clear that it was one of those next right actions that God put in front of me that I just had to say yes to. I said, “Okay. I will talk to this pastor once a week on the phone,” and so I started talking with him. He was a wonderful, wonderful mentor, a wonderful guide, and he said to me, “Why don’t we start by reading the Bible? Why don’t you start by reading the Gospel of John? And just take your time and read through it, and whenever questions come up or things you want to talk about, we’ll just talk about it on the phone once a week.” And so that’s what I did. I actually started—I had a drive. I was driving from Los Angeles to Sacramento to go stay with a friend for the weekend, and I decided to listen to the audio version of the Bible, read by Max McLean, and so I listened to Max, in my car, read to me the Gospel of John. And I still remember the experience completely to this day. It was… I was alone. The sun is shining, and it’s that same feeling, that same feeling of just being washed with water, this bell ringing inside of me. There’s something about this truth. It’s just resonating. It just feels so right and so true. And in fact, once I got all the way through it, I was so thirsty for me, and at the time, I didn’t know there were Bible apps and different things, so I’m driving and trying to find… “I need to find more Bible that I can listen to in the car!” I’m frantically scrolling on my phone while also driving, which was not a great idea, but it was like I was so thirsty! I listened to the Gospel of John and then I just wanted more. I just wanted to consume more of the Bible. And I had a very interesting experience this entire spiritual journey of simultaneously going through what I was going through and then also watching myself in total disbelief. “I cannot believe this is who I am.” I still feel like this on almost a daily basis, like I pinch myself. I look at my husband, and I’m like, “Who are you? How did this happen? How is it that I’m a Christian? How is it that I have these two children with you? How did this life even happen?” It’s just so mind blowing to be called to goodness and truth and then still have that very dear former self part of me that sort of judges all of it and questions all of it and is a skeptic about all of it. It’s a really amazing dichotomy that I get to live out on a daily basis. Oh, I’m sure! And I bet there are some people listening who are saying, “Yeah, you are a rational, intellectual, skeptical person.” So you mentioned that you had been reading some books. I wonder if… Not that the scripture isn’t intellectual in and of itself, but I wondered, did you read beyond that in terms of intellectual grounding of the Christian worldview? Or to support maybe that what you’re reading in the Bible is actually true and reliable text? Did you wrestle with any of those issues?  Oh, very much. The entire process was a wrestling match. And this pastor psychologist who counseled me, one of the things that he said to me that was the most powerful, that has always stuck with me, is he said, “Faith requires doubt. Faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is not 100% certainty. If it was, it wouldn’t be faith. Of course you doubt. You will continue to doubt. You doubt, and you take a leap of faith, anyway,” and that was a real revelation to me. Because I always wanted to have 100% certainty, and that’s just not available in human existence. You’ll just never… Even in atheism. Sorry. I would never have admitted when I was an atheist that atheism is a stance of faith. It is a belief system. You believe that there’s nothing. You believe that life is meaningless. But that’s the case. And so, at the time, I really struggled. I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which was also incredibly enriching because C.S. Lewis had been an atheist, because C.S. Lewis was such an intellectual and so well read. I mean, he spoke to me very, very deeply. He got me, right? He understood me. He knew that God had to prove himself intellectually to me, and He did. I was very lucky, in that my initial exposure to Christianity, having been a former atheist, was C.S. Lewis, Timothy Keller. Max McLean had recommended to me Tim Keller’s sermons, and I think I consumed nearly, and have consumed nearly every single Tim Keller sermon that exists in the world on the internet. I find him incredibly intellectual. I never knew that a pastor could talk like that. As a former atheist, I thought that Christians were either sort of what I’d call like a used car salesman, where they have a like a really cheesy smile and they’re like, “Praise Jesus!” Or like a very somber, Catholic, pageantry Mass. Neither of which appealed to me as an intellectual atheist. Then I find these sermons, and I think, “This man talks like a college professor. This is meeting me intellectually, where I need to be met,” and so our God is so amazing, He can meet anybody where they need to be met. For some people, it is a very spiritual experience. It’s like that white light experience. And for other people, like me, it’s a methodical intellectual breaking down of ideas, reformatting my mind and my thinking, and that is what God did with me. That’s wonderful! Now you’ve spoken about your journey, where you came from, and then you found yourself saying that you believed you were a Christian. Talk with me about how your life has changed since you became a Christian. And what of that question of meaning and void in your life? Has it changed at all? Has God met you there?  Yes. 100%. My life has changed. Now, that does not mean that my life does not have struggle. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things that are hard or challenging or difficult. I still cry. I still have anxiety. I still have stress. But it’s not like it was before. It is not this meaningless, hopeless, debilitating depression. I now am married to a Christian man. We both love Jesus more than each other. Jesus comes first, before anything else, comes before my marriage, comes before my children, comes before my career, my success, money in the bank, how I look, whatever. Because I know that ultimately all of those things will fail me. Even my husband will fail me. My kids will fail me. My body and my health is eventually going to fail me. Everything is going to fail me. The only thing that is not is God. And realizing that, realizing that I don’t have to strive and strain and struggle, that it’s not all up to me, which it always used to feel like it was. “It’s up to me to find the thing to make myself happy and to give myself meaning.” And now it’s like I can let go and just let God take over, and we’ve been very, very blessed in our Christian life together, my husband and I. We’ve had struggles. We’ve had very painful losses in our family. We’ve had tragedies. We’ve had things that we’ve had to deal with, but we also know that this world is not the end all, be all. This is not the ultimate. There’s something greater. For now, we’re here and it matters, and it’s important, but it’s all going to fade away eventually. It’s all going to fade away eventually, and so we get to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, knowing that that is our ultimate hope and that is our ultimate meaning, and it has definitely, definitely served me well. Well, anyone who’s listening can see the obvious, or hear the obvious, change in you, that it is night and day from where you used to be. As we’re kind of turning the corner here, you have a voice of wisdom because you understand what it means to think and live as an atheist for a long time and in a very deep way. I guess you could say you lived it out to its fullest. But you also found Christ. And I think one thing that’s really beautiful about your story is your willingness to seek. That you were not just a seeker but you wanted to find. And you did. You found.  Yeah. So if you were speaking to someone, a curious skeptic who’s listening in today, how would you speak to them?  Yeah. That’s a great question. For anybody who’s struggling out there, I would just say that it’s never too late. It’s never too late, and you are never too far gone. There’s truly always hope. I know, for me, it was very, very hard to believe that there was hope. It was very hard to believe that there was any way out of the dark that I was experiencing. And it really felt like it was going to kill me. It really felt like the darkness and the depression was going to destroy me. And for somebody who’s in that place, I would say it won’t. It may feel like you’re going to die, but it cannot take you unless you let it. And I’ve heard so many stories from people who were at the very, very, very end of their rope and said, “Well, I might as well try this Jesus thing, and then if it doesn’t work, I’ll kill myself, anyway,” and that was their coming to faith moment. I would just encourage someone that, if you’re in pain, to try something different. If you’re so far gone, if you’re so desperate, if it’s so bad, you might as well try something different and just give it a chance. That is what I did, and I couldn’t do it myself. I was powerless, but God is not powerless. He can do it, and so I let Him. I let Him take over. And I have been following him ever since. And I would just encourage anyone to honestly and earnestly look into it and give it a try. Or just like you did, just that honest prayer. I love that honest prayer. “I don’t believe you’re out there, but if you are,” and it looked like the Lord really answered your prayer, like you say- Yeah. Come to Him as you are, you know? You don’t have to get good or get clean. You just come to Him exactly as you are, wounds and all. You are totally accepted. You come to Him with your doubts. You come to Him with your skepticism. You can curse Him outright to His face if you want to. Don’t worry. He can take it. He is God. You know? I used to have this note that I had on my mirror that I would look at every single morning, when I was early in my spiritual journey, and I loved it so much, and it said, “Good morning. This is God. I will be handling all of your problems today. I will not need any of your help, so have a nice day.” That’s terrific! So, turning the corner then, now as a Christian, you see things freshly, with new eyes, and I’m sure, thinking back to the man who came up to the table to you, you know, and he approached you saying, “Jesus loves you,” and it was so off putting to you. I wonder, as a Christian now, how would you best invite us as Christians in terms of engaging with those who don’t believe. Maybe not like that, but maybe. It sounds like he was a little bit of a touch point, even though at the time it wasn’t what you wanted or expected.  Yeah. I mean, when I share my story, not just with you here, but just with friends, with friends and family, because I come from a family where I am the only Christian. Nobody in my family believes, and when I talk about it, I don’t try to convince anyone. I don’t try to argue or anything. Really I think the most effective thing I can do is speak from my own personal experience. And share my story. I know that it’s true, that it is objectively true. It’s not just subjectively true. It’s not just my truth. I know that it’s true, but I also know that you do have to approach people with a certain stance and a certain posture, and coming up and saying, “This is true, and you should believe this,” may turn some people off. So when I talk to people, it is my truth, and it is my experience, and I gladly and willingly and openly share it with people. And I think just going back to… We were talking earlier about the Stories of Us episodes at PragerU. I mean that’s one of the reasons why they’re so effective, is because they really are people’s personal stories of transformation, where they get to just speak authentically. And it’s a way to not only change minds but to change hearts, too, and I really pray that my story would change some hearts and minds and maybe bring even just one person closer to God. That’s beautiful! Like you say, it’s like someone may not be convinced by a story, but it might open the door for them to seek for themselves. And we can hope for that, right?  Yeah. What a beautiful story, Adrienne. What a beautiful life you’ve lived. It’s been tragic but beautiful. I mean, when you think of the word redemption and a redeemed life, that’s what comes to mind when you tell your story, that you moved from kind of a darkness to light and from a fragmented brokenness to such wholeness. Not perfect. Like you say, none of us are perfect, but it’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. So thank you for… Oh, yes? Anything you want to add.  I was just going to say thank you so much. And even though I did a lot of work, I really don’t take credit for this change. It really wasn’t me. The only thing that I did was that I became willing. I became willing to make different choices, but God is the one who did the change. Jesus is the one who did the change in me. That was all Him. That was all His doing. And He is the reason for my life now. That is why… Anything good I have is because of him. And I just want to encourage everybody out there to go watch this story. If you just go to prageru.com, you can watch my Stories of Us episode, and I’m just so grateful to get to share this story and hope that it affects some people. Yes, yes. Praise God that you were willing.  Yes. Because the result is glorious, really amazing.  Thank you so, so much. Oh. You’re so welcome. And thank you for coming on.  Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Adrienne’s story. You can find out more about the books and resources she recommended in the show episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. Please rate, follow, and share this episode with your friends and social network. We would greatly appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how someone else, another skeptic, flips the record of their life.   

Raised in a secular country, Alex embraced an atheist identity into adulthood when a surprising encounter with Jesus Christ dramatically changed his life. Alex’s Website: Faith Thinkers https://faiththinkers.org/about-us Recommended Resources: The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, Habermas and Licona The Case for Christ, Strobel To learn more about the C.S. Lewis Institute Fellows Program, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org Hear more Side B Stories and learn more at www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who once identified as an atheist who became a Christian. Oftentimes, they grew up in a world where there are no apparent traces of God, no reason to believe in God, no experiences of God in their lives. In my research with former atheists, the number one reason they gave for disbelief in God was that there was no subjective, no personal evidence for God in their lives. They didn’t see or feel God both in their lives and in the world. In many Western, secularized, European countries, there are traces, artifacts of Christianity, of its historical presence and the remaining relics of architecture and its rituals and holidays, but there seems to be little apparent belief in the lives of people. The vibrant faith or hope that once was has been replaced with a settled independence and autonomy, for some a felt isolation, emptiness, and darkness. Atheism then seems a natural response to what is seen, what is felt, or perhaps what is not seen and what is not felt. Although it may not be existentially or emotionally desirable, it must be true, or so it is thought. But what happens when someone is driven to press beyond their culture, beyond their circumstances, beyond their personal despair to look for something more? And in their journey encounter unexpected life and joy and a real God who they believed to not exist. Alex’s story is nothing short of fascinating. It is truly a story of moving from darkness to light, from depression to life.  Alex moved from a world bereft of hope to someone who cannot help but tell almost everyone he meets about the God who saved his life. He wants others to experience the joy and love he now radiates. I hope you’ll come along to hear his amazing story of transformation and be inspired or challenged. I hope you’ll also stay to the end to hear him give advice to curious skeptics towards seriously considering the possibility of a real God, as well as advice to Christians on how they can best engage with those who don’t believe. Welcome to the podcast, Alex. It’s so great to have you! I’m so happy to be with you. Wonderful. Alex, as we’re getting started, so the listeners can know a little bit about you, why don’t you tell us about your life right now? Yes. First of all, like I said, I’m really happy to be with you. I always enjoy talking to you and seeing you at different events. I feel like I haven’t seen you in a while. But I live in southwest Florida, in a city called Fort Myers, and I love living here, and I’m a full-time financial advisor, and I have some Christian ministries on the side. But I feel like I’m a Christian minister 24/7 because we’re called to be ministers and sharing the gospel of life with everyone. Oh, that’s wonderful, Alex! I can tell that you’re not native to Fort Myers, Florida, though. I hear a very distinct accent, and so I’m very curious. Of course, I’m familiar with your story, but for all of us, take us back to where you were born and where you were raised. Talk us through that world. What did it look like in terms of religion, God, your family. How did you grow up? Yes. I was born in France in 1972, in Paris. My parents were immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, and they grew up—that was a Communist regime, and by the grace of God, even though they were not strong believers, they wanted freedom, and my dad was in his twenties, and so he was very fortunate to be able to leave the former Yugoslavia and go to France, which was—when I was born and before I was born, in the sixties, it was a wonderful country, very welcoming to immigrants, very loving. The neighborhoods, even in Paris, were big families, and so I grew up in that environment. And I had a fairly normal childhood, even though my parents were not wealthy. They always provided, and I had really nothing to complain about. The only thing is that I didn’t like school very much, and the reason was because politically I didn’t see eye to eye with my teachers. My teachers, a lot of them, were Marxists. They were actually promoting the ideology that my parents had fled from. So most of my friends were from a Muslim background and from north Africa. So I learned a lot about Islam with them, but I was not very religious to start with. And we were what I call CEO Christians, Christmas and Easter Only. We went to church only twice a year, and so I was not very religious to start with, but then around the age of 13, 14, my dad had a heart attack, and that really shook my world. And I dealt with a lot of internal pain, seeing my dad suffering and knowing that one day he would die because he was a heavy smoker and he had health issues. That really shook my faith. I didn’t have much faith in God to start with, but then I made the decision that there was no benevolent God, no good God who cared about His creation because that’s what I thought, because otherwise why would He do that to my dad? You see how the roles get reversed. The responsibility’s not on people and how they live their lives but rather it’s on us blaming God and shifting the responsibility to God because we don’t want to accept our own. So that’s the environment I grew up, and I lived in France until the age of twenty, from birth to twenty, and I failed high school at the age of twenty. So I had a really difficult childhood because I didn’t care for school. I didn’t have any direction in life. I didn’t have any foundation. I didn’t have any peace or joy. And I’m a fairly happy person in general, but it was very hard for me. Okay. But that’s pretty much in a nutshell how I grew up. Okay. Well, good. It sounds very interesting and challenging, especially in a culture where Marxism was becoming more prevalent, in a world that your parents were trying to escape and then they found again. I’m wondering, especially as a Marxist worldview was entering into your culture and the nominal religion that you were experiencing really wasn’t that meaningful, what did you think that God and religion and belief—what was all that? Was it just some kind of a social activity that people went to but it wasn’t real or true? What were your perceptions of religious people then? Yes. In America, a lot of people perceive religion as a social activity or things of that nature because a lot of the churches are social clubs, or organizations are social clubs, or charitable organizations, so that’s how people perceived it, but in France, France being one of the most secular countries in the world, most people, including myself, perceived religion as being something for people who were ignorant, who were uneducated, and people who were anti scientific. So there were two spheres. And you can see that happening again. Everything that’s happening in France is happening now, forty years later, in the United States, where you can see how those who are atheists in America are trying to push people of faith into the sphere of uneducated, anti scientific people, right? And so that’s the way I perceived religion, for people who are fragile, people who are weak, and of course, I was always one of the more successful, because I’m a fairly driven person in general. When I came to America, I started becoming successful in my business. Then that only made things worse, of me seeing myself as a person who is not a person of faith, being much stronger than any people of faith. And seeing people of faith as being weak and fragile mentally and needing a crutch, not realizing that faith actually is, and Christianity more specifically, is based on evidence. It’s not devoid of evidence or devoid of intellectual belief. To the contrary. And you know that all too well because of apologetics, which you and I really respect and like. But that was my thinking of religion, was that you had to be really weak to believe in a God and that you needed a God to believe in, versus I needed no one to believe in because I was my own man, and I was strong enough to control my life and do things—instead of you praying for God to do something for you, I was actually doing it while you were praying about. But that’s very common of people, thinking that way, right? And this false view that somehow people of faith are weak and fragile and need a crutch because they’re not strong enough on their own. So that was pretty much my view of religion in general. Yeah. That’s interesting, that perception of people who believe in God, that it is anti-intellectual in their eyes, but yet you made a decision to finally reject God because He didn’t show up for you and for your father, that He wasn’t there, that He allowed, somehow, your father to become in poor health. So it was a real mixed bag, wasn’t it? It was not social, it was not scientific, and it was not intellectual, and yet there was this subjective reason, too, existential, that He just didn’t do the things that He was supposed to do. It’s true that it seems like many people reject God not for intellectual reasons actually, because if they were seeking intellectual reasons, they would actually find God if they were genuine, but there’s always… it seems like, not always, but many times or most of the times there’s some kind of emotional element to the equation, where they were hurt. Yes. And that certainly can at least be a significant part of many people’s story. So, Alex, here you are twenty years old. You are in school or getting out of school. You’re still living in France, but it’s not necessarily where you want to be at the moment. Talk us through that. Give us the next step in your story. Yes. So I’m twenty years old. I just failed high school in France, which most kids fail at eighteen, and then they’re given another chance at nineteen, and usually they pass high school at nineteen. Well, I failed it at twenty. And so I really didn’t see the point. So that added to the depression, too. But by the grace of God, because God is so good that He knew my life from before the foundation of the world, He knew where I would be, where He would take me, He had His hand on my life, and I didn’t know any of it, but He sent me—my dad’s assistant at work, she overheard that I wanted to leave Europe and go to the United States. I don’t even know why United States. I have no idea why I kept saying the US. I didn’t really know anything about the US. Maybe because I wanted to make money, maybe America was rich. I really don’t know. I don’t remember. But I kept telling people I wanted to go to the United States, and my dad’s assistant at work overheard that, and she said, “How are you going to leave? How are you going to go there?” I said, “I really don’t know. I don’t know anybody there. But I really need to leave. Otherwise, I don’t know how I’m going to end up here. I may commit suicide because I really hate my life, and I hate being here.” She said, “We have an American missionary from Kentucky, and she organizes trips for kids to go to America for a few months. You should meet her because she’s leaving next Tuesday,” so you’d better believe it, I woke up on Sunday and went to church, not because I wanted to meet God, but because I could meet somebody who could help me. Because it was all about me, right? It was all about me, and I was going to do whatever it takes for my wishes and desires to be fulfilled, even if it meant telling people that I’m a Christian. Because all that mattered was me getting ahead. So I met this lady, and again by the grace of God, she helped me. Well, she helped me because I expected—see what happens, when you think a certain way, you project your thinking onto other people. You think that everybody else is like you, right? So because I was all calculating and only doing things that benefit me, I would never do something for you voluntarily because it doesn’t help me, then I projected that onto her. I’m like, “Why would she help me? What’s in it for her?” So my expectations were very low, but then a month or two later, I got a letter in the mail, and I picked it up, and I read it, and she said that she had found a family for me, and I just want to cry right now because it brings so much memories to me and how she found a family in Illinois and that they would welcome me for a year to go to high school. I cried, and I ran, and I ran… I could’ve run a marathon. I had so much energy. I ran through Paris. I probably ran through a third of the whole city. I was so excited. And I couldn’t stop crying and being so joyful, so happy, and so anyway. So that was the beginning of my journey, and I came to America on October 2, 1992, and that was an interesting day, because I came. I didn’t speak English. I had $200 in my pocket. I had not met any Americans besides this lady. But when I landed at the Indianapolis airport, I honestly felt like I’d come home. And, like I said, United States is not perfect, and I didn’t understand why. Why would I be so excited? But then I found out later on that it was basically the Judeo-Christian roots of this nation. There was something in the air. There was the Holy Spirit, and I could sense the Holy Spirit, but I didn’t know what was going on. So I went to school and was supposed to go to high school for one year, and during that year, I learned just a little bit of the language after three months, and I said, “You know, I’m wasting my time in high school. I’m not going to get any degrees. How about I go to community college, so I asked my parents. My parents were poor because, after my dad had a heart attack, he also lost his business. He did business with former Yugoslavia and put a lot of money into it, and then Yugoslavia went into civil war. So he basically lost everything. But my parents borrowed, and they always said yes to everything I wanted. And also I want to mention that I grew up, and the two things that I’m really proud of that happened in my parents’ lives is that my mom was always, me growing up and before I was born, was a fortune teller. And when my dad lost his job, she was cleaning houses, and he was a breadwinner, but then when he had a heart attack and couldn’t really work much, she went to a profession of being a fortune teller and won all kinds of prizes and things of that nature, but God always protected, and He always protected me, and I never was interested in any of it because, as an atheist, I was a hardcore atheist. To me, all of that was quite silly, and thank God I did not dabble in that stuff. And then my dad got really, really into Masonry, the Freemasons, and was moving up the ladder, because my dad was looking for brotherhood. He was looking for that kind of solidarity, for that kind of family, right? And he found it initially in the Masons. So my dad was moving up the ladder and was so proud to move up the ladder. He finally found something that he could invest himself in, give himself into, brothers and moving up the ladder. He was really proud My dad was very disappointed with the Masons at the end of his life, and he felt like they were all in there for themselves and they were not interested, really, in investing in other people, but they were there to get something out of it. So he was very disappointed. But here’s the thing I wanted to tell you about my parents. My dad. In 1996, on his deathbed—he had open heart surgery, and he got an infection. Eleven people died from the infection. He was the last one to die. He was there eight weeks, getting dialysis every day. He was on his deathbed. Eight weeks before he died, he had an out of body near-death experience, and he met Jesus face to face, and that, to me, is so incredible. And I talked to—of course you know, Dr. Gary Habermas, and I don’t know if many people know who are watching your show, but I imagine many do, but Dr. Habermas, if you don’t know, is one of the lead experts, if not the lead expert, on the resurrection of Christ and has written some books on near-death experiences. So I went to Dr. Habermas, and I said, “Gary, is this a near-death experience of my dad?” And I explained how he met Jesus. He said, “Alex, not only is it a near-death experience, it’s the most common near-death experience that people experience, when they meet Jesus.” And that is crossing a body of water. Because the water, I imagine, signifies the Holy Spirit. But, anyway, so he came back to his body, and he was instantly born again, so everybody who walked into his room, he would say, “Sit down. I want to tell you about Jesus,” and of course all these friends who were secular… so they would say, “I don’t want to hear about Jesus.” He would say, “I’m sorry. If you don’t want to hear about Jesus, then the door is right there, so you can just leave right now.” And they said, “No, but I want to see you.” “Well, then I’m going to tell you about Jesus.” So he told everybody about Jesus before he died. So obviously, as an atheist, I didn’t believe my dad’s experience. I thought it was from the drugs, that he was hallucinating, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that was seven years before my experience, ‘96 to 2003, yeah, seven years. And then my mom, after, became a Christian. she gave up fortune telling, got rid of her cards, and stopped doing that and started reading her Bible. So I started working. After four years of university, I started working for a company, a major company, as a financial advisor. So I’m an atheist. I arrived in 1992. I finished my studies. Now I got hired to work as a financial advisor in 1997. So I’m still unhappy with myself, but I’m telling myself, “You know what? That’s because you’re poor. Once you become rich and you can afford buying anything you want, then you’re going to be happy. Obviously. Right now, the stress of life and not having funds to do what you want to do, that’s what’s keeping you from being happy.” So I started moving up the ladders. I worked very, very hard. And then, in 2002, my ex-wife left me, and she left me, and that really destroyed my world. Because she was my god. She was my everything. Not even money. Money was secondary to her. She was my idol. And when she left me and left me for good, my whole world fell apart. And I went through six months of severe depression, and in April of 2003, I decided to finish my week, go home, and commit suicide. And I was still in the same place where I’m at now, in southwest Florida. So I finished my affairs and went home. I’m making a long story short. Because there are a lot of details. But I went home to commit suicide, sat down and started contemplating on my life, contemplating how I was going to commit suicide, and the only thing I could think of was my mother and my nephews and my sister, and how tomorrow, when I’m not there and the news is brought to them that I committed suicide, how they would react, and I knew they would suffer for life. So now, for the first time in my life, I felt like I was not in control of my life anymore. I was at a dead end. A moral dilemma that I could not come up with a solution with. One, I didn’t want to live. I did not want to wake up another day to face life. Life was evil. People were evil. I was the only good person in the world. That’s how delusional I was. That I was the best person in the world and the whole rest of the world was evil. But at the same time, I couldn’t commit suicide because of my mom, my sister, and my nephews. So that moment I was going to turn—without even knowing, I decided—the only solution I could think of was that I was going to turn over my life to the devil. Now, I didn’t think of it in those terms, but I decided, “You know what? I’m just going to live like everyone else. I’m just going to take advantage of every single person. Financially, sexually. In whichever way, I’m just going to live for my own self.” Because I was already selfish, but I didn’t see it that way. I saw myself as a moral human being, but I was going to turn my life over completely to a devil. And that moment I cried out out of anguish, because something in me was ignited, and I cried out, and my soul left my body, and I saw my whole life come in front of my eyes and how Jesus had walked with me from the beginning of life, when I was born, and how He protected me, and I saw my whole life. It was more beautiful than a Hollywood movie. It was so vivid and so beautiful. And then I came back to my body. And people tell me, “I don’t believe you, Alex.” I said, “I really don’t mind you not believing. I don’t care. Because I wouldn’t have believed myself. I didn’t believe my dad having the experience. So why would I expect you to believe it?”  But one thing you cannot explain is how, after I came back to my body, I went from total depression to total joy, total depression to total love. I felt like I had so much love in me I had to unbutton my shirt because I thought my chest was going to explode out of love. And since then, I’ve carried that joy of the Lord, and no one can truly explain that. So that’s when I met the Lord, and then… It was around 11:00 PM at night, so I’m like, “Who do I call to tell what happened? To explain and tell them what happened,” and of course it was too late to call Europe. So I called my Muslim friend, a local, and I said, “Well, he’s religious, and I know that the most religious people I know are Muslims, because they give the appearance of being the most religious,” just like the Pharisees, they give the appearance of being religious, but again, that doesn’t mean that they are born again, that they have the Holy Spirit in them. So I called my Muslim friend, and I said, “You have to help me.” He said, “Come over, and I’m going to explain everything that happened to you.” So I went to his place, and he said, “Alex, everything that happened to you is in the Koran. You have to read the Koran. Everything.” I said, “But why the Koran? This is Jesus. I felt Jesus. I didn’t see him, but I felt Jesus. Jesus is Catholic. He’s not Muslim.” He said, “No, no, no.” That’s how much information I had. That’s how much knowledge I had. That he was Roman Catholic. And he said, “No, no, no. He was Muslim.” I said, “Jesus was Muslim?” “Absolutely, he was Muslim. Yes, you’ll see it all in the Koran.” I said, “Wow!” He said, “Yeah. It’s just we don’t believe that He’s God.” And I’m like, “Well, that makes sense. Maybe He’s not God. Why would he be God? He’s just a human being.” So, anyway, I started reading the Koran before I read the Bible, but I read it with the Holy Spirit, and what happened, within days if not minutes. I can’t say minutes, but I would be willing to bet minutes. But within days for sure, I could tell this was not a religion from God. That it was not a revelation from God. And I started going back to my Muslim friend and friends in France, and they all started telling me. “I don’t know which Koran you’re reading, but you’re reading the wrong Koran.” I said, “Well, this is the Koran I bought.” They said, “No, no, no. Here, I’ll get you the right one.” I said, “Okay.” So I have seven Korans, and all seven Korans say the same thing, but they didn’t know that what I was showing, pointing out to them, was in the Koran. That’s how ignorant so many people of faith are. They don’t even know what’s in their holy books. Including Christians. Yeah. Right. People who claim to be Christians don’t know what the Bible teaches. So I went back to my friends, and when I went back to France, I did the same thing with my best friend that grew up with, Kamal, and I said, “Kamal, look what it says in the Koran.” And I was not a Christian per se yet. I was seeking. Even though I was born again and it was just a matter of time, but it had to make sense intellectually. And that’s why apologetics is important. That’s why Paul speaks of renewing the mind in Romans 12:2. Because just because you’re born again, you still have to work on renewing your mind and reading the Bible and work on loving God with all of your mind, because if you don’t, you’re going to start believing things. Even as a born again person, you could believe things that are false. Anyway, so that’s what I was doing, and I told my best friend in France, and when I showed it to him, he was really shaken. And then later on I baptized him, and he became a believer, so that was really beautiful. So I studied for a year and a half, and what really helped me was apologetics. And that’s why I like apologetics so much. Specifically one book, The Case for Christ, and of course you know that book. Lee Strobel. And that really, really helped me. And I was like, “Wow! There is so much evidence!” And then I started reading people who… I was like, “Christianity is based on evidence. It’s not devoid of intellectual belief or reasoning.” Then I started reading people like Bart Ehrman and things of that nature. And then I started realizing how weak his arguments are and how even sometimes, and I know many people are friends with him, Christians, and they don’t want to use these words, but how dishonest some of the arguments are. So a year and a half later, finally I knew 99.999% that Jesus was who He claimed to be in the Bible, and the Bible was the word of God. And then I always remember my Jamaican friends, that asked, “What are you waiting for?” “Well, I’m waiting for 100%.” They said, “No. Alex, please. If you wait for 100%, you’re never going to get 100%. You’re at 99.999%. I think that’s enough, so tonight you should give your life to Christ.” And I did. And even though I was born again, that was a commitment. It’s like loving a woman and wanting to marry her and marrying her. Yes. The love is there. The love is there. The passion is there, right? But still making that commitment was quite important for me, and when I did, I regretted immediately that I had not done it a year and a half earlier. But I had to go through what I had to go through. That’s part of life. But then what I did, I went and got a master’s degree at Biola University online in apologetics, and I learned so much, and I loved it. I met some great people. Great professors. And I learned so much. That gave me a foundation for apologetics. My mission, not God’s mission, my mission was to be a prophet or a minister to America. I absolutely did not want to go anywhere else because I still love this country so much, and I didn’t like the rest of the world. So why would I want to go elsewhere? Well, that was my thinking, but my plans are not God’s plans, so I went to France one time, and I met a man that God told me, told me his name, and when I met him, it was a confirmation that I was supposed to meet him. So I explained my testimony, like I did to you, but just in five minutes, and he looked at me. He said, “Alex, next year I’m organizing the first public debate in France between Muslims, radical Muslims, and Christians. You will be the Christian. And I looked at him and said, “No. Absolutely not, Sir. Absolutely not. I appreciate you trusting me, but, A, I haven’t spoken French in years, and my French is really rusty, B, my whole theological training in apologetics and Islam is in English, so I don’t even know the translation, the words in French, and C, my ministry is to America, not to France. I don’t like France.” So he said, “Sorry. God told me. You’re going to have to do it.” And I’m like, “Okay. Sure. I understand you think you heard from God, but I assure you you didn’t hear from God.” So I had one question for him. I said, “Sayid, what if I lose? What if I lose? I’m not an expert. What if I lose?” And I love his answer, and that answer stayed with me ever since, because sometimes we are our own worst enemies. We will say, “Oh, I’m not equipped. I’m not good enough. I’m not this. I’m not that.” And we don’t do the things we should be doing, instead of just jumping in faith and letting God be God through us, right? Yes. So he looked at me. He said, “Alex, you cannot lose because we won 2,000 years ago.” And he said, “You go and open yourself to God, and I promise you good things will happen.” I’m like, “All right. Now you’re putting it on me and my conscience,” so I said, “Okay, Sir. I’ll try my best.” He said, “You’ll be fine.” So I did the debate and more debates and more debates looking back now, people either converted that I debated, so I baptized an imam, the second-most influential imam in France. I baptized him. He’s thriving now, preaching the gospel all around the world. The one person I debated the most, who, according to me, would never come to Christ and is still not confessing accepting Jesus, but he should, because he, a couple of years ago, came out and publicly said that the crucifixion of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus are the two most sure historical facts from antiquity. So for a Muslim, it would be—supposedly Muslims deny that Jesus was crucified and thus resurrected. So God has been really using me, and by His grace, and I’m still surprised when I’m on your show or when I’m speaking about God, because it’s not like I was the best candidate for those kind of things. God has opened some doors, and I’ve been able to minister to people in power, and that’s been really quite amazing. Amazing that God has opened those doors. And so that’s my prayer request if people are watching your show, listening, that they would pray that God would send more souls in my life, because I love seeing people—when somebody comes to Christ, my faith gets multiplied. It’s not in addition. It’s a multiplication. And when we see people coming to Christ, it’s just the most beautiful thing. And then you realize that what you’re doing is worth it. It’s completely worth it. But even if we don’t see it, we still should be doing it. Because that’s what we’re called to do. And the harvest is plentiful, as we are told, but few are the workers, right? Right. So the things that are important is discipling and preaching the gospel. Those are the priorities, and when we do those things, we know 100% that God is on our side, that that will always be in His will, and He is going to honor our efforts because He will bless those efforts by the power of his Holy Spirit. Those are powerful words, Alex. And it’s an amazing, amazing testimony. Talk about going from darkness to light, or depression to joy. I love the way that you really spoke to that. Your life really shows, demonstrates that contrast of just lostness, I guess you could say. And just looking and then finding in such a profound way the person of Christ. So unexpected, really. I mean, you said you were actually calling out for darkness, and you found light and said Jesus showed up, like He had done in the life of your father and even your mother. Showed up to you. It’s just incredible. It’s incredible, and I think your story may surprise some people, in terms of the spiritual experiential nature of it, but for me, I guess, having heard your story before. I’ve spent some time in France, with the church in France. And hearing, really, if I can say this, the oppression, the spiritual oppression and the darkness that is being experienced there and the power of spiritual darkness there, and hearing more stories like yours, where darkness is broken by powerful spiritual experiences. So, for me, it’s not a surprise, but for our listeners, it may be. But you’re one among many, and I want to make that really clear, that the Lord works in very powerful and personal and experiential ways even today in the West. It’s not just in unknown parts of the world. It’s where God needs to be revealed, and He reveals Himself in ways that cannot be denied. Obviously, in your life, your life took just a complete change immediately, just like your father, to where you cannot help talking to others about Christ. And that is your mission in life. It’s so, so very clear. It’s compelling. And inspiring. I’m wondering now, for those who may be curious about your story who are not believers, who are skeptical, willing to perhaps look, maybe open, because obviously they’re intrigued by your story and the complete life change that you’ve had, based on what you believe to be true and real and good. And very relevant to your life. What would you say to the curious skeptic who may be listening in? Yes. Very good question. Yes. You’re not alone. Most people have questions. And many people have actually good questions. And so just because someone you ask, someone who believes in God, doesn’t have the answer. It doesn’t mean the answer is not there. A lot of people are not trained to give answers. That’s the sad part. All of the Ivy League schools were founded for students to be trained to give answers to those objections, but the church today, sadly, has gotten too comfortable for too long and does not train people to give answers, because what is a church? One is to go and be in communion with the body and to worship together and be with the body, but two is to train us, to prepare us to go to the world. And that’s what the church is about, and sadly, the church has not trained its people to go and answer these objections. So if you have questions and objections, please reach out to us, because there are answers. I promise you. Answers to every objection. Now, are the answers always specific? For example, if your question is why did this specifically happen to me? We’re not God, so we may not know why specifically something happens at a certain time, but if it is an intellectual objection, some kind of objection to God, His existence, or the Bible’s veracity, or Jesus’ crucifixion, or His deity, whatever it is, the Christian faith is based on evidence, and you can see that. Luke, when he opens his gospel, his first chapter, he tells us that… And he’s a physician. He was not an uneducated person. He was a very educated man. He tells us that the accounts were written, it’s a historical account of what eyewitnesses and those who were disciples or companions of eyewitnesses, what they saw with their own eyes. So the evidence of Christianity is based on evidence, and so if you have objections, if you have questions, please reach out to us. Seek, because we’re promised in the Bible, if you’re seeking with the right kind of attitude, not seeking for the sole objection to attack Christianity or to deny it. If that’s your sole priority or objective, then you’re not seeking with the right mind and with a right heart. But if your objective and if you’re seeking, like, “I truly want the truth. Wherever the truth takes me, I will be willing to go,” I promise you, you will get the answers. I promise you. Because the answers are there. So reach out to me or to Jana or whomever it is. Please reach out to us, because we are there to help, because we have been helped. The reason I’m here, where I’m at, is because, I wanted truth. I didn’t care about people’s personalities or character or what they did, whether they’re sinful, sinless. I wanted the truth. I had questions, and I wanted answers to those questions. So you should have the same attitude. Sadly, many people reject Christianity because they’ve had a bad experience, and I remember one time one guy said, “Oh, I stopped going to church once I saw my priest buying a lottery ticket.” What does that have to do with your relationship with God? Relationship with people. We are to be seeking God, not seeking people. Our faith is not in people, but if you have questions and objections, seek the answers to those questions and not people. Because many people join Mormonism or Islam because they’re looking for community, the same reason my dad joined the Masons, because he was looking for community. He was looking for brotherhood, right? So he found it initially, but that does not make Mormonism or Islam or Freemasonry true. So seek the answer to questions. Remove emotions. We’re emotional beings, and trust me, I’m one of the most emotional people you’ll meet, but remove emotions from the equation. When you’re seeking truth, you’re removing emotions from the equation, and you’re looking for answers to your objections. And you’ll find them.   That’s wonderful. And I wonder if you have a word for the Christian, too. I’ve heard you speak about the need for training, preparation, the encouragement to be on mission for God, to be prayerful. I wonder if you could speak to any of those things or whatever’s on your heart for the Christian. We need to help one another, because we need one another. No one is an island. We’re not created to be lone rangers. We’re created to be a body. That’s what the Bible speaks of. It compares the church to a body, where I may be the arm, and then you may be the eye, and the other person is the ear. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. But how is one part of the body going to function without the rest of the body? And how powerful is the whole body when it comes together? When we come together and we’re united, nothing can stop us. Absolutely nothing can stop us. But the enemy wants to divide this body. So that’s the work of the enemy. So if we come together and we train one another and we help one another, you don’t have to go to seminary. You don’t have to go and get a PhD in apologetics. Just go to a group of men, and you will learn so much, one from the other, and then maybe do some ministry together as a group, and go preach the gospel or minister to the poor or orphans and the widows. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. You do something, and you’re going to see a result, and it’s going to be quite visible, and it’s going to be quite powerful. Thank you for that challenge. Your story truly has been completely inspiring, Alex. Just your person, the way that you radiate Christ, and your passion for Him. Not only your intellect but also your mission. You have found life abundant, and you want to give it away, and you’re looking for the best for the other. It’s incredible. Truly incredible. So I thank you for coming on to share your story with us today, Alex. Thank you so much. And all glory to Jesus, all glory to Him, because I was blind, and when you’re blind, I cannot choose to see. I was blind, and He’s the one who gave me sight. So all glory to Him. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Alex’s story today. You can find out more about Alex by looking at the episode notes and his contact information there. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, follow, rate, and review, and share our podcast with your friends and social network. We would really appreciate it. 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.

We are excited to share with you some special news about the podcast and a new phase of ministry for the newly named Side B Stories. Website www.sidebstories.com

Former atheist Jim Warner Wallace embarked on a personal investigative journey and eventually became convinced of the reality of God and the truth of Christianity. J. Warner Wallace’s website: https://coldcasechristianity.com Books by J.Warner Wallace Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe Forensic Faith: A Homicide Detective Makes the Case for a More Reasonable, Evidential Christian Faith Episode Transcript Well, welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jim. It’s so great to have you with me today.  Well, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. Before we get started into your story, why don’t we start with where you are now, so the listeners have an idea of who you are?  I worked homicides, cold case murders mostly, in Los Angeles County for a number of years, and most of my work ended up on Dateline, so there are several episodes out there that will illustrate the kind of work we’re doing. They’re unsolved murders. There’s no statute of limitations on a murder. I was not a Christian most of my adult life. Now it’s been 25 years, I guess, I’ve been a Christian. I was 35 when I first walked into a church. And somebody described Jesus as really smart, and that’s what really started the journey for me. So today, I write books, I still have a couple of cold cases that are open that I need to tinker on a little bit, and for the most part, I get a chance to talk about Jesus a lot, which is what I love doing. That’s fantastic. Well, let’s get started back early in your story because, like you said, you were an atheist probably for most of your life, so I’m very interested in how those views towards atheism got started. What formed that kind of belief? What was the culture that that was fostered? Your family? Did they have any kind of religious belief? Start me in your childhood.  I think my mom was raised definitely as kind of a cultural Catholic but not somebody who ever opened a Bible, really was familiar with scripture. If we had a Bible in the house, I wasn’t aware of it. I think she has one now, but it was not the kind of thing we had in our house. And I didn’t know any Christians. I really didn’t even know any Catholics as a kid growing up. But I think I would have identified my Boston Italian side of the family, her family, were definitely raised within kind of a Catholic ethos, but really uninformed kind of view, and it was the kind of thing that we might go, when I was younger, much younger, like elementary school age, I remember we would go to church on Christmas, for sure on Christmas. Easter not so much. But by the time I was maybe in junior high or maybe upper elementary, I just told my mom I was done with it. “I don’t want to go on Christmas. I’d rather not go.” And I had a very sarcastic view, largely because… You know, my parents divorced when I was pretty young, and my mom was not allowed… She talked about… I wasn’t even sure what the heck she was talking about, but there were certain privileges that the church offered that she was no longer going to be allowed to take advantage of. That’s how I saw it. That’s all I really knew. I didn’t know there was a sacrament issue or any of that, I just knew that, “Really? So now you’re in a different status because my dad left you?” So I just thought, “All of this is such a bunch of nonsense,” and I was growing in the ’60s and ’70s, when, you know, this is the Star Trek generation that lands on the moon and eventually thinks that science will have the answer for everything. And I was in southern California. I was in Los Angeles. So I was in a relatively secular environment. No one around us that was Christians. Never got invited to church by anybody. Just saw no place for it. So at first… I could be relatively patient with people who are believers, unless they try to aggressively assert what they believed. Then I’m going to call it out for the nonsense that it is. And that was pretty much my view. And as a detective, I often would encounter Christians… We had a couple in the department who were officers who were not really good at articulating what they believed or, more importantly, why they believed it to be true. They were just raised in the church or they had an experience that changed their minds, and I’m not a big believer in experiences, so… I mean, everyone has an experience, so I just didn’t think that that was worth considering. So, to me, it just seemed like a bunch of nonsense, but I would, for the most part, not say much about it until I encountered one of these Christians who would be outspoken, and then I was quick to knock it down. And that was my view. So I would say I was a thoughtful atheist, because I really thought… and part of it is it’s not hard to be thoughtful if the people you’re encountering who say they’re Christians are not able to defend what they believe at all. All you have to do is give a 10% effort, and you’re going to exceed the other side by ten times. They just weren’t able. They were not equipped to… Like, “Why do you trust the Bible?” “Do you have the originals of the Bible?” “No.” “So if you don’t have the original document, how can you even trust that you have anything close to the original document?” And a lot of the folks I would push back even… and I’m just hearing this stuff from other nonbelievers. This is a little bit before the proliferation of the internet. So there’s a lot more skepticism out there today than there was… I just would hang out with other atheists, and we would mock these Christians together, and then you start picking up on their way of mocking, you start adopting that yourself. Before long, you all sound like each other, and that was really where I was for a number of years. And I can point to… I watched a guy do a bank robbery, just to have him tell me he was a saved Christian on the way back to jail. So I was not impressed. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like there were a lot of reasons for you not to be impressed really, between the hypocrisy- Well, yeah. I would’ve probably said that, anyway, but the arrogance in me… And a lot of us think we know better than anybody else around us, especially if you’re in a position on a job where you’re constantly called to solve the problem. They call us to come in as an authority figure to settle this thing. Well, if you start to take that too seriously, you start to think that basically you’re the source of information, rather than somebody else. And I think it’s probably not uncommon amongst people who do that kind of work to kind of think that they can’t be taught anything. That’s an interesting insight, really, and sometimes we’re not aware of our own blindness in that direction, right? You were in a position of authority, and I think that that would really feed into your understanding of yourself as knowing more than.  Not only that, you kind of feel like you’re the good guy. Yeah!  So you’re the atheist who’s not doing a bank robbery- That’s true!  … talking to the Christian who is. That’s true! Absolutely!  Yeah. So that’s part of it. Yeah, no, yeah, I totally get that. So there were a couple of things that you raised there that interest me. One is you said that you were a thoughtful atheist, and I’m curious did you understand the implications of where atheism goes, in terms of the big questions of life.  So I would’ve said it this way: I would’ve said—this is the old Jim now, okay? I would’ve said that moral truths are grounded in groups that make decisions about what is the law of the culture, and those things change and evolve over time, and you Christians ought to know that, because at one time you affirmed polygamy and slavery and a bunch of stuff that you would say is not good now. So clearly it’s not grounded in the nature of your God. It must be grounded in the nature of the time in which those groups lived. That’s what I would’ve said. Okay. And that typically would stop the conversation right there. But again, as a logical, analytical, obviously very bright person, did you pursue the logical endpoints of your atheism? In terms of where that headed, whether it be how you explained the origin of the universe. I would’ve said, “Well, look, I’m not quick to jump to God for those kinds of scientific quandaries or mysteries that we have since solved. I mean I could have easily jumped to God, I guess, when I thought that Zeus was the thrower of the lightning bolt, but at some point we discovered where lightning really comes from, what causes lightning in the atmosphere, and so I don’t have to attribute it to an act of Zeus. I can actually find a naturalistic explanation, and so for every other thing you want to quickly attribute to God, I would say, ‘Be patient.’ The way we were patient with lightning. You will eventually have an answer from a naturalistic perspective. That is the trajectory of human history. It’s not toward theism, it’s toward naturalism,” and I would’ve said, “Just be patient.” Oftentimes you’ll hear an atheist say, “Well, there’s no evidence for God,” right? There’s just no evidence for God. Dismissing out of hand without consideration. Did anyone even try to bring any logical argument or evidence for you to even seriously consider?  Well, yeah. I mean I’m sure that a couple of these guys who are Christians in our department would make claims that they thought were well supported historically about the Gospels, but I had bigger problems in terms of even believing that… I mean I would give you there’s some form of Jesus maybe, but there’s not the miraculous form of Jesus. That’s just stupid. I mean why would we believe that anything in the New Testament that describes a miracle is reliable? The minute you enter a miracle into your narrative, you had made a genre change. You’re no longer doing history. You’re now doing mythology. That’s the genre in which miracles occur. You’re not doing science if you’re going to interject a miracle of God, either. So I would have said, these are two, by nature, by definition, naturalistic disciplines, and you cannot do science or history if you’re going to start including miraculous explanations. That, to me, was the foundational groundwork that we started, so I would say, “You were talking history for a second there until you mentioned that, and you just switched over into mythology.” I would’ve said the same thing that people say to me today. “Look, are you going to go solve the next crime by assuming that there’s a demon out there that is equally as responsible as the suspect you’re looking for? No, you’re not even going to consider supernatural explanations. You’re only going to consider naturalistic explanations because you know in your heart of hearts there are no such things.” That would’ve been my response. Yeah. And so when you think of Jesus and the miraculous as mythology, then I would imagine that your view of the Bible or any kind of religious text would fit in that genre.  Yeah. And I’ll tell you why. So part of this for me, too, was growing up with a divided family of atheists and Mormons. So I don’t really have any Christians. I wouldn’t call my mom a Christian growing up, even though she would’ve said she was baptized as Catholic. I mean it just was not part of our life at all, and she was not reading scripture, she was not ever talking about this stuff. It was just like, “Well, you know, I’m a Californian, and in that way, I’m also a Catholic.” So because you happen to live here does not mean you know anything about California, and that’s kind of where she was. The other side, though, I had a group of very well-informed Mormon believers, because my Dad’s second wife because a Mormon pretty early on in their marriage, and then they had six kids, all of whom they raised LDS. My dad’s a very committed atheist. He will tell you why he thinks Mormonism’s false. So I’m watching all this, and I’m thinking, “Okay, all of you nut jobs think that your religious view is true. You think yours is true. The Mormons think theirs is true. They think you’re wrong, by the way. That’s why they’re out knocking on your door, to try to convince you that Mormonism is better than Christianity. Well, why would I believe any of this nonsense?” Right.  “It’s just all different levels of nonsense.” And so that’s where I stood for many years as an atheist. So you’ve painted a very clear picture of where you were.  Pretty dismal, right? But I’m just being honest with you. People will say, “What kind of atheist were you?” Yeah.  Susie will tell you that, when I finally walked into that church with her and this started to change, she saw just a change. Years later, we did an episode on 700 Club, and they wanted to come out and interview her, and I had never really heard her talking about it, and as I’m watching this interview with her, I realize, “Oh, wow! She saw that entire thing as a miracle.” Because while she was open and neutral, she saw that I was completely closed. And so something had to happen in order to change that. Right. So let’s step into that. So you were a detective, and you had no desire for God or anything to do with religion. It was complete nonsense, and even, obviously, you had some kind of antipathy towards it as well. For good reason. For good reason.  Well, I’m not sure it was a good reason, but it was the reason I held, anyway. You can embrace an atheistic worldview without ever having to bend your knee to God. But this worldview requires you, as a first step, to do this thing we call repentance. Right? To repent. To change your mind. To trust in Christ. To confess your sin. To bend your knee. Every tongue will confess. And I think that’s just a really hard step for a lot of us. Our atheism has never asked… As a matter of fact, our atheism has elevated us, whereas Christianity puts us in our proper place. It’s a hard thing to bite off. It is. And you raise a good point for me because, in looking at all of these stories, one of the most interesting things for me is to see what moves someone from a closed to an open posture towards God. Now you mention your wife Susie. So obviously, she has something to do with leading you, perhaps, in another direction. Why don’t you walk us through what moved you from a closed to at least a curious perspective?  Well, Susie and I met in 1979. We were together about 18 years before we walked into that church, and during those 18 years, I can honestly say we never talked about God’s existence. Was she an atheist?  She was raised as kind of a cultural Catholic also but much more open. And so, because I knew her before we got married, once we were married, this was just not part of our relationship. It was something we did on Christmas. If she was with her mom, she might go to a Mass with her mom. And if I was there, too, if I wasn’t working that night, because I worked as a police officer. Sometimes you’re working on holidays. Murders almost always occur on holidays. So you’re always working holidays. But I would go if I was available, kind of the same way you would sit down for a Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t like turkey, but I’ll sit down for the Thanksgiving dinner because it’s part of that traditional holiday. Right.  So in the same way, I would go, “If you want to go to a Mass, great,” so when we had kids, she said, “Well, do you think we…” because she had been… She said, “Even you, your mom was a cultural Catholic as a kid. Should we start?” I’m like, “No!” I mean, “If you want, I’m… I want to do what pleases you, so if you think we should do this, then we’re going to do this.” My dad, even today, will go to church as an atheist. He thinks that the world is a better place, the country’s a better place, if it holds to Christian ideals, even though he thinks they’re based in a foolishness, they’re based in a delusion. He says the ideas that emerge from that delusion are still powerful, and, “I would rather live in a country that is under the shadow of Christianity than one that isn’t.” And I’m, very honest, the same way. “Yep, I can agree with that.” It’s a relatively law abiding, conservative worldview? Okay. I’ll be happy to go if you want to go. But I also knew that if I wait long enough she may just forget about it. She may not push it. And for three years, she didn’t. She would mention it. Like when we moved into this neighborhood, I knew right away that our kids were school aged, and she was thinking, “Should we take them to church?” And I just avoided it and always had an excuse, every weekend. But then, about three years into living here, it came up again, and I said… For whatever reason, I said—and this is where I think God works. I said “Okay, I’ll go if you want to go.” I assumed we were going to go down to this Catholic parish, but somebody had invited us to a big evangelical church, so we ended up at this big evangelical church. And we walked in, and I’d never been in an evangelical church, really. Not for a church service, for sure. And I’d never seen anything like this on top of it all. This was a megachurch. And I was pretty sarcastic. I went with a partner of mine who had invited us, so he was there, and he kind of played off my sarcasm a little bit, so that was good. It made me a little more comfortable. But I can remember Susie—her only experience ever going into any kind of setting like this was a Catholic setting as a kid, so she was like, “It doesn’t seem very holy here.” Because it was like a big warehouse! Right.  And it was like a big stage presentation, you know? And so I was just willing to sit through it. I really didn’t think we would ever come back to it. I figured we’d probably go someplace else maybe next time or whatever. But the pastor pitched Jesus in this way that was provocative, saying that he was the smartest man who ever lived. He said a bunch of other related… You know, “He’s more important than any other historical figure,” all kinds of other stuff. Some stuff that he said was biblical that I just didn’t really care about. But the idea that He was smart did provoke me to buy a Bible to see if that was true. Interesting.  And I got a pew Bible, and I still have it. And I put the tabs in it because I started to pour through this, and I started to look at the gospels, and I thought, “It’s clear these people who are writing the gospels think that this stuff actually happened. They want me to believe that it happened in this order. They’re acting like they’re eyewitnesses of this. John even says, at the end of his gospel, “We could say a lot more than we’ve said so far, but it would fill up a lot of books.'” So I started to look at these gospel accounts as eyewitness accounts, and one of the things you do to test eyewitnesses is something called forensic statement analysis that’ll help you test deception, deception indicators, things like this, So I started first in the Gospel of Mark and worked my way through all the gospels, and when I got done, I told Susie… This took some time. And I told Susie, I said, “You know, they seem like they would pass the… If I was doing this… Take out the miracles. These pass the test.” The only thing that’s in there that bothers me is the miracles. But at some point I did start to reexamine my biases against the supernatural, and so when you’re talking about, for example, the beginning of the universe, you have to ask yourself, “Is there anything inside of space, time, and matter, that can cause space, time, and matter, or are those two mutually exclusive cause and effects?” So in other words if you can’t cause yourself to come into existence, that means whatever causes space, time, and matter has to be outside of space, time, and matter, and there really is a problem. So you already believe in something extra natural if you just seriously consider the beginning of the universe. So I just tried to learn to drop my innate biases against any… Because if there’s a God who’s powerful enough to blink everything into existence from nothing, well then every New Testament miracle is a small potato miracle. You can probably walk on water if you can create the water to begin with. So I had to at least kind of open the door to that possibility, that reasonable inference, and that’s where I started to see my change in my own view of the gospels. I bet that was surprising to you. I mean, having considered the Bible myth or mythology as a genre. Delusion, I think you used the word. To suddenly, as an investigator, a serious investigator looking at the eyewitness testimony and saying, “There’s something really valid here. There’s something historical and accurate here that I can’t dismiss.” I suppose those things were breaking down the wall of resistance, I guess you could say, because it sounds like you were willing to actually look at it in a serious way, rather than just dismissing it, and so- No, that’s true. And a lot of that for me was—even though at some point I told Susie, “I think these are probably going to test out okay, but I don’t know why God would have to come this way when He came this way. Why would He die on a cross?” I didn’t understand the gospel even as I was confirming the claims of the gospels. So at some point I was like, “By the way, if this thing happened. If Jesus actually rose from the grave, it’s game over.” Everything changes because the authority of people who rise from the grave is different than those who don’t. So I have a tendency to trust people who come out of the grave. So that gives Him an authority that would change the way I see everything He said. A lot of this was us trying to make that transition. So just for clarity, you said you were willing to take with credence the things that you were finding in the Gospels except for the miracles, but then you just described the greatest miracle apart from creation, and that is-  Yeah. So this is why when people say, “How clean was the investigation?” I wrote a book called Cold Case Christianity. Well, actually, it was my investigation that’s in Cold Case Christianity and the one that’s in God’s Crime Scene, and the one that’s in this new book, Person of Interest, that was happening all at the same time for about nine months, and what I mean is that I had to stop at some point and say, “Well, what’s keeping me out? The miracles.” So then I’d say, “Okay, do I have really reasoned, substantial reasons to reject miracles?” I knew that this was always bugging me from the Star Trek days, like, “How do I explain the beginning of the universe?” The standard cosmological model is still a big bang cosmology even today, and that’s still the standard model because most physicists and astrophysicists and cosmologists think that’s how the universe came into being. Everything came into being from nothing at a point in the distant past. And we’re talking about nothing. There is no space before space, no void before the void. All space, time, and matter came into existence from true nothing, the stuff that Aristotle says that rocks think about, nothing. So that means that I already had a belief in something outside of space, time, and matter that could have that kind of causal power, so that’s when I returned to the Gospels and said, “Okay, so if that’s the case, and if they check out every other way, am I supposed now to believe that He rose from the grave?” Now that would explain certain things that I see in history. That’s the stuff we’re talking about in Person of Interest. In other words, if he really did rise out of the grave, wouldn’t you expect there to be a ripple effect on human history that goes beyond the four authors of some little gospels in the first century? This is a huge rock that someone’s throwing in a lake. I would expect all kinds of ripples. But as a guy raised in southern California, I wasn’t educated on what impact Jesus of Nazareth had on human history. I would’ve said it was probably very limited. It was probably whatever Christian history you want to dig up. I had no idea that literature, art, music, education, science, and other world religions were standing on the shoulders of Jesus of Nazareth. And that’s what we’re trying to do in this book is to show… Once I started to look at that, I go, “Okay, this makes sense now.” Given the possibilities, three possibilities: One, He’s a myth. It’s fiction. It’s all fiction. It’s always been fiction from the very beginning. Would He have this kind of impact on culture? Would you be able to reconstruct every detail of the myth from these weird aspects of human culture? I don’t think you could. Number two, He’s another… just a guy. A guy who lived. What other person who’s ever lived has had this kind of impact? I mean unless you don’t know the kind of impact Jesus has had. You won’t find anybody else who has had this kind of impact on history. In the most important things, that were important to me as an atheist, literature, art, music, education, and science. How about this? He’s God incarnate, entering into His creation. Well, now all that impact makes perfect sense! Right? That we, as humans designed in the image of God, eventually encountered God, and then we can’t stop talking about Him. And He provides the catalyst and the igniter for all the things that matter in history! And that’s really what we’re looking at in Person of Interest. So it was a very ugly kind of… I was lucky. I was assigned, at the time, as undercover detective in undercover division, and a lot of that is down time. This is before the internet, but it was just early enough. I didn’t have a computer. So I asked my sergeant, “Hey, if I come in every morning and I pay for the ink and the paper, would you let me print out everything I can find about Jesus?” And he said, “Yeah, as long as you bring the ink and the paper,” and so I did. And I had these huge binders of stuff I was trying to dig up, plus all the books I could find, and I kept them in my unit and my car. It was an undercover car. And I just had them in the passenger seat, and they were all stacked up, and so I would just sit for hours digging through this data, and that’s what is in these different books. So what was this process like in terms of time? How long did it take for you to kind of move through this process of your gradually moving from being totally unconvinced to being convinced that there was something real and true about the person of Jesus and the story and the Bible?  Well, I think it started in the middle of… was it ’95? Maybe ’95. And I think by the middle of ’96 I have a name tag where I’m serving in the children’s ministry. And I did that, really, before I was a believer, but not much before I was a believer. Believe it or not, I was in this huge megachurch, and we were going now more often toward the end of that first year, and our kids would not sit still in the children’s ministry, so one of us would sit with them usually, So we were asked to lead it, and I remember saying, “Well, I don’t know anything about scripture. I’m learning, but I don’t feel like I’m equipped to teach students.” They said, “Look, we’ve got curriculum. So I started serving in children’s ministry even when I didn’t know anything. So yeah, I just don’t know when. I wasn’t keeping track of it back then. I didn’t know it was going to lead anywhere. I should have a spiritual birthday, but I don’t because it was a process for me. It wasn’t an epiphany moment. It was a series of events, and at some point, I’m serving in the church, and I’m sure by that time I was probably pretty convinced it was true. So, as you were becoming convinced that it was true—you had spoken earlier about Christians who really didn’t know how to answer your objections and who didn’t seem very well informed. Your understanding of Christians were they were uneducated. As you were reading through this material, obviously some substantive material that you were reading through, perhaps Christian writers or thinkers or apologists who obviously were educated in some way. I wonder. Obviously your perception of Christians and Christianity was being changed. Were you discussing any of these things with other Christians who were more educated as you were moving through this process?  Well, I mean I wish. There were people I was listening to, I started to listen to, on air. One of them was Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason. He had a local radio show here in Los Angeles, and I was listening to him. He had a couple of hours a week, two or three hours a week. I can’t remember how long it was. And I was not always convinced at first, but I was impressed that at least there were other kinds of Christians out there. Right. At the beginning, when you were talking about, as an atheist, you saw God basically as a God of the gaps, that it was just an excuse for explaining what we don’t know quite yet in science, but science will know, or naturalism will know, at some point. But obviously, when you came to believe that God exists, how did that affect your understanding of the reconcilability or the compatibility of science and God and thinking about comparing that with your earlier explanation?  Well, sadly, when I first started looking at this DNA and the information in DNA and how you explain information in DNA, it was not something that was on the forefront yet, so a lot of this has been a process, too, of getting to a place where you’re looking, “Okay, what is the best inference for the things we see in the universe?” which is the approach I took in this book called God’s Crime Scene, right? It’s kind of an inside or outside the room principle. Not every death scene’s a murder scene. If I can explain everything that’s in the scene, that’s in the room, by staying in the room for an explanation, it’s not a murder. It’s going to be a suicide, a natural, or an accidental. So if I get there and there’s a pistol, but it’s your pistol. There’s one shot fired. Well, you can fire one shot. There’s no one’s fingerprints or footprints in the room other than yours. Well, this is probably a suicide. On the other hand, if I get there and it’s not your pistol and there’s bloody footprints leading out of the room, well now clearly the best explanation is not in the room anymore. It’s outside the room. Now I shift to murder. Well, the same thing can be true of the universe, okay? If I can explain everything I see in the universe by staying inside the natural universe for an explanation, space, time, matter, physics, and chemistry, then there’s no intruder. But if the best explanation for the stuff in the room is somebody outside the room, you’re going to have to go outside the room for an explanation. And that’s exactly the approach I took as a new investigator of scripture. I’m like, “Okay, so which is the best explanation? Is it inside or outside the room?” Well, it’s really… The origin of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, the origin of life, the appearance of design in biology, your consciousness, your free agency, your moral intuitions, even evil is best explained by a moral standard, a creative force that’s outside of space, time, and matter, outside the room. And so, in the end, that’s still the best explanation for the stuff we’re seeing in the room. So it’s not a jump, right? It’s that I’m trying to find the… You go to any crime scene, there’ll be evidence in the crime scene. And each of your partners will develop an inference. They’ll say, “Oh, I think this is best explained by the girlfriend.” “No, it’s best explained by his wife.” “No, it’s best explained by his coworker.” We’re just trying to figure out what’s the best explanation for the evidence in the room. Same thing with the universe. And so I think it was a reasonable way to approach it, and I do think that, today, to jump to science to say… in all those eight areas I mentioned, science is relatively quiet. How did life originate in the universe? “We’ll figure it out someday.” Well, that’s just science of the gaps. It’s just the equivalent of God of the gaps. Someday God will tell me. “Well, some day a scientist will tell you,” is the exact same approach. So we have to be careful. In all of those eight areas, it’s really just science of the gaps. That’s quite a juxtaposition from where you’ve come. It sounds like, Jim, that you took a real intellectual journey and you found a worldview that is not only true with regard to eyewitness testimony in the scripture but also gives you a comprehensive worldview for how you can look at all of reality. I’m curious. You mentioned one other thing I want to explore, and that is you said that you were investigating or researching the Gospels, but you separated out the gospel, apart from that. I know that belief in Christ is not only intellectual belief that He existed at a certain place and time in history, and all of these things led up to Him and have fallen out in history in terms of seeing the amazing effect of Who that Person is. But I know that to call yourself a Christian is really more than that.  Right. That’s “belief that.” That’s not “belief in.” Yeah, so- The demons believe that. Right.  But they aren’t saved. Right. So, for those who are listening, especially maybe a skeptic who doesn’t understand that it’s more than just an intellectual belief, that there is something called the gospel, how would you put all that together?  Okay. So I think even my acceptance of the gospel—so the gospel, what I mean by saying the gospel, is the plan of God in which He can reunite Himself to us, or us to Him. Because we have separated ourselves from God by our fallen nature and our rebellious nature. And we all know this even if you’re not a Christian. You know you don’t teach your kids, your infants, to be impatient. That’s their default position. You don’t need to teach them to be jealous, teach them to be prideful. That’s their default position. We are fallen by nature from the moment we emerge from the womb. That’s just the nature of who we are. The question is how did we get there? Why is that the case? And how do we get reconciled? If there is a Being that is powerful enough to create everything from nothing, well that Being has the power to eliminate imperfection. You’re trying to unite yourself not to a good God, to a perfect God, to a morally perfect God, and you might have good days, but you never have morally perfect days. You’re not a morally perfect being. How do you ever expect to be reunited to a morally perfect Being? Well, you’re going to have to adopt the perfection of some—you’re never going to be practically perfect, but you could be positionally perfect, and that’s about the gospel. That’s about what is it that brings us back to God? How is it that God forgives who we are? How is it that we can repent and change? And who’s nature can we adopt if our nature is never going to be good enough? And it’s not. There’s the one perfect Man, right? And this is the gospel. Now, I will tell you that, in order for me to make those kinds of claims I just made, those are thoughtful claims. Those aren’t feelings. Those are intellectual propositions about the nature of God, the nature of humans, and the nature of reconciliation. These are actually intellectual claims. So I think even to understand the gospel, you’re going to have to use your mind to do it. This is why Paul doesn’t talk about the renewal of your feelings or the renewal of your emotions. He talks about the renewal of your mind. This is a thoughtful worldview. We have always been people of the book. We are a teaching worldview. The first thing Jesus says is don’t go out and make converts, “Go out and make disciples, teaching them what I have taught you.” That means, right away, you’re going to be establishing monasteries and cathedral schools and universities. You’re going to have to teach people how to read. You’re going to have probably create alphabets. You’re going to have to translate everything because you’re a teaching culture. Well, that’s the culture we are. The difference, though, for me was you can read everything there is to know about Jesus and you can research everything there is to research about Jesus, and you can get to believe that Jesus is who He said He was. That doesn’t make you a Christian. But I needed to move past that and start to read the New Testament, not for what it said about Jesus, but for what it said about Jim. And I trusted it for what it said about Jim because I first tested it to see what it said about Jesus. And once I determined it was telling me the truth, I started to trust it for what it was saying about me. And what it said about me was really true, that I’m not God. I don’t have a right to even put myself in that category. And I am that fallen person who seeks after his own selfish gain, who is always, by comparison to God, depraved at best and in need of a Savior. Lucky for me, I already knew there was a Savior, so I just put those two things together, and that’s how I gave my life to Christ. So I’m a Christian because it’s true, not because it works for me. I say that all the time. Because I honestly think that’s what you have to ground this in. Because there’s going to be lots of days when I’ll say God is good but I’m having a terrible day. Outwardly, I probably could make a case that God is not that good. But I know that God is good, that God is love by nature because I’ve thought through the evidence, and even on days where I don’t want to believe it, it’s still true. Yeah. That’s powerful. As we’re coming to a close, you’ve… That’s really some excellent advice, even for the Christian to push towards understanding the grounding of their belief, to investigate it seriously, to take the Word seriously, to look into the reasons and the arguments why God exists and why it’s true and it’s worthy of belief and to be able to give good answers. I’m not sure if you want to add to what you’ve already really encouraged and really admonished the Christian to do, but is there any other word for the Christian before we move to advice to the skeptic?  So I would say this: There’s already something that you have much more robust knowledge of probably. Even those of us who call ourselves Christians. Now look, you have a great podcast that examines these issues every single episode, so maybe the audience that’s listening to us right now is already… like you’re preaching to the choir on this, okay? Because they already get this. But most of our friends who are Christians know far more about the NFL rule book than they do about this playbook we call the Bible. They know far more about the H&R manual at their business, or what the rules are, if you’re a cop, what the law in California is. You can do the penal code. You can probably recite portions of that. No problem. But you can’t do the Bible. And you even call yourself a Christian. So what it comes down to is that we have the capacity to do this. We just don’t do it. We just do it in other areas. And that gives away what we really worship. That gives away what really matters. Now I’m as guilty as anyone. I was a Christian for a number of years before I left law enforcement. I still have a couple of open cases, but I am officially retired. And when I drove off that compound for the last time, it struck me that my identity is still in my work. I say my identity’s in Christ, but I wouldn’t feel the way I’m feeling right now if that was true. I’d be celebrating the fact that I get to now live my identity more robustly because I have more time. Instead, I was mourning the loss of my identity. Because in the end you can say all these things, but how we live is often very different. So my advice to all of us who call ourselves Christ followers is let’s show it. Now I’m offering not as somebody who’s saying, “Be like me.” No, no. Don’t be like me. I can’t do this, either. I have the same problems, the same limits. I find myself still having the same hesitation, the same distraction, the same sinful inclinations. I’m Paul in Romans 7. I’m still doing the stuff I know I shouldn’t do, and I’m not doing the stuff I know I should do, and that’s just the nature of what it is to be human. So don’t take this as, “Well, you could be more like me.” No, I need you to be less like me. We need all of us to be less like us. So that’s my advice to those of us who call ourselves Christ followers. Now when it comes to advice to atheists, let’s just consider the outcome of where this all heads. Think of it as a thought experiment. It used to be C.S. Lewis, I think it was, the idea of liar, lunatic, or Lord. Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic, or a Lord. Well, I think there’s another trilemma that we can look at that’s a little bit different. He’s either fiction or just another guy who lived in the first century or the God of the universe. If you look at how history has panned out, the fuse and fall that we talk about in any crime scene. Before the crime occurs, there’s a fuse that burns to the detonation of the bomb. Then there’s a fallout afterwards. The same thing happens with Jesus in the first century. A fuse that burns up to the appearance of Jesus, this explosive appearance of Jesus, and then fallout of history. The Person of Interest book I’m talking about just examines the fuse and the fallout. But if you ask yourself a question. He’s only one of those three things. If He is mythology, then how do we explain His impact on history? If He’s just a mortal, how do we explain? But if He’s God, now this impact makes sense, so my suggestion, my encouragement for those of us who are wondering which of those three it is. He’s either a complete lie. He’s either just a regular person living in the century. Or He’s the God of the universe. It turns out that the history the way it shaped out with humans on planet earth, it’s far more reasonable to believe the third option than it is the first two. And so I would say know your history, know the impact that this sage, this ancient sage from this obscure corner of the Roman Empire. How in the world did that guy change everything? Why are we calling it the first century for that guy? Well, we are because He’s not just a guy. I am just so overwhelmed with all of the wisdom and insight you’ve presented, not only through your story but just along the way. I’m also—I guess I just want so, for those who are so closed or so dismissive of the faith to really take an honest look, like you did. And I’m hoping that this story sparks at least the curiosity that it did in you. Because I’m confident, as you are, the detective who’s devoted years to looking at the evidence now, that you’re more convinced than ever that this is true, that God is real, that Jesus is who He says He was and He’s worthy of following. So I’m hopeful that, at the end of the day, there will be someone out there inspired to actually just stop and really be willing to take an honest look.  Thank you so much, Jim, for coming on today. This is an extraordinary story. You’re an extraordinary man and follower of Christ, and we have all benefited from your work, and I just want to thank you so much for coming on to tell your story, so that when people read your work, they can even know more of your background and who you are as an author, and more importantly, as a follower of Christ. So thank you so much for coming on.  Well, thanks so much for having me. All of those nice things you said, I feel embarrassed, because none of them are true, but what is true is that we worship a God that’s so big that He can take every one of these broken stories, every one of these people that think that they’re so full of themselves that they actually matter, and He can take our gifts that we give back to Him, which much look like the crayon drawings of your children being offered back to you as an offering. And all of this work, all of these podcasts, everything we do is just another version of the crayon drawing that we’re giving back to Jesus. And luckily, you know what? He smiles. With what little we’re able to give Him, and so I’m just glad to be on the podcast with you. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much.  

University biology professor Dr. Dawn Simon dismissed belief in God until faced with convincing intellectual arguments from an informed Christian, Tim Stratton. Dawn‘s recommended resources: On Guard by William Lane Craig Tim’s resources: Website: https://freethinkingministries.com Contact: tim@freethinkingministries.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their life, from atheism or skepticism to belief in God. It’s often thought that belief in science excludes belief in God, that somehow they are not reconcilable, that one cannot be a serious student of science and be a serious believer in God. After all, Richard Dawkins once said Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Many atheist thinkers over the decades have touted the story of atheism as the courageous scientific progress of man, overcoming primitive superstitions and make-believe gods, that we no longer need a god of the gaps hypothesis to explain what we are now seeing in the world and through science. Has Darwin definitively ruled out the possibility of God, as Dawkins suggests. Or is it still possible to believe in God and evolution at the same time, as Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga and others contend. That evolution does not necessarily disprove the existence of God. Along with Dawn, we’ll also be talking today with Tim Stratton, someone who was quite influential in engaging Dawn on the issues of science and belief in a thoughtfully challenging, intelligent, and humble way. This should prove to be an intriguing story. I hope you’ll join in. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Dawn and Tim. It’s so great to have you both with me today. Dawn: Thanks for having me. Tim: It’s great to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, I’d like our listeners to know just a little bit about you both. So we’re going to introduce both of you one at a time. Dawn, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are now, and then we’ll get back into your story after Tim introduces himself. Dawn: So my name is Dawn Simon. I am a professor of biology, and my specialty is actually molecular evolutionary biology, and I am at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. And Tim? Tim: Yeah. My name is Tim Stratton. I’m a professor at Trinity Theological Seminary and College of the Bible, teaching apologetics and theology. I run a ministry called Free Thinking Ministries. People can find me on YouTube under that name and also find my website, freethinkingministries.com, and yeah, I just have a passion for apologetics and theology and evangelism, and I think you’ll see some of that today. Fantastic! And for those of you who are listening, we’ll put those sites and links in our episode notes. So let’s get started with your story, Dawn. Take me back to where you’re from, where you grew up. Talk to me about your family. Was religion or God part of your world growing up? Dawn: So I grew up in a small town in eastern Iowa, so heavily Catholic. So we were a town of about 2,000 people, and we had two churches in town, both Catholic. And I come from a very large extended family, so my mom has a family of 12 and my dad has a family of 11. Everybody’s Catholic. My grandparents were definitely observant, and many of my relatives were as well. My parents were not particularly, though I did go to Catholic school and I went through all the sacraments associated with that. I would say, while I knew… I could win Bible trivia and I knew the rules. I don’t think I ever was a believer. Even though if you would have asked me as a third grader, “Do you believe in God?” I probably would’ve said yes because that was the right answer. That’s the answer I was supposed to give. My parents… we just didn’t talk about it. Ever. So, in general, my family left those kinds of ideas or beliefs about a higher being as personal. They’re not things to talk about. You believed or you didn’t, but you kept it to yourself. And so I can distinctly remember having some questions at a young age. I had this Children’s Bible that had a picture and then one story per page that my grandma gave me for my first communion. And I liked it. I mean, I liked the stories. I definitely had the distinct impression that you just don’t ask questions. Yeah. So you were growing up in a Catholic world, I guess, nominally Catholic, it sounds like. Dawn: Yes. You went through the motions. It was more ritual and perhaps rules. You were in a Catholic school. But you’re also telling me, even as a young child, you were inquisitive. You were what I would consider a critical thinker or even introspective or really thinking about the books and the beliefs that you were asked to believe. And you weren’t exactly buying it. It sounds like you were pushing back at an early age. That tells me a bit about you. So you went through Catholic school, elementary school. Did you go through middle school and high school? Dawn: No. Our town only had Catholic school through elementary school, and then I transferred to public school, but we still had what was called release time religion class, where you would leave in the middle of the day, cross a parking lot, go to religion class in a building across the parking lot, and so I did that until I made my confirmation, I think in tenth or eleventh grade. So I wasn’t at a Catholic school but was still doing the release time religion classes. So I’m curious. At that time you were actually confirmed in the Catholic church, how were you feeling and thinking about that? Were you buying into it at that point? Or were you feeling a bit conflicted about even going through the motions of that kind of sacrament? Dawn: I wasn’t conflicted, in the sense that… I mean, it never really had a deeper meaning. It was just a thing we were supposed to do. And so… I remember that there were questions, like you had to pass some test, I think. I don’t know. The bishop asked you questions, and it was very nerve wracking whether you were going to get the right answers, and so I was really focused on just that. It was just like a thing to pass. And so I never thought too much about deeper meaning. I mean I was conflicted in the sense that I remember—I don’t remember it with confirmation, but around that same time, I really thought I didn’t believe in God. And I had asked my mom. I remember saying to her, “I don’t think I believe in God,” and it was super hard for me to say because I knew that was bad, and it made me feel like a bad person. And she didn’t have a thing to say about it. So she had no response. Dawn: No. Nothing. Nothing. Because we have a… My mom’s cousin is a priest, and I remember thinking. I don’t know if I said it to her, but I was hoping that’s what she was going to say, like, you go talk to him. But that didn’t happen. So did you ever think, “Well, perhaps I should go talk to the priest?” Dawn: I thought I should, but it was too scary to do it, because I wasn’t supposed to think that, so it was bad, and I thought it made me a bad person, and so I wasn’t going to do that. I mean, I confided in my mom. And it wasn’t like she disapproved. She just didn’t have anything to say in response. And that’s kind of how my parents are in general. They’ll support me, but it’s up to me to figure it out. Well, I think it was really quite courageous for her to reveal that to your parents, but I hear you when you say that… It sounds like there wasn’t a real safe place for you to go outside of your home to ask the bigger questions. Dawn: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So did you take on the identity of an atheist then? Or is that something that came later? Dawn: No. Yeah. I was really reluctant to call myself that. Always. I never got over the reluctance to say that I was an atheist. Well, and one thing was I had learned very early… I mean, and I don’t even know if this definition is right, but what I had learned was that an atheist is that you know for sure there isn’t God and an agnostic is you’re not sure, and so I’m not sure about anything. And so I thought being an atheist… I mean I really thought, “Who would say that?” Certainly not me because I’m, again, not sure. I mean I might be 99% sure, but to me, in my mind, atheist was you’re 100% sure there isn’t a God. And for me, I think I was always hoping there was. I didn’t see any evidence for it. I thought that was probably wishful thinking on my part. And so I would have said I was agnostic, but I didn’t think there was a God. I just wasn’t sure. And so that actually never really changed, even though, by most definitions, I think people would call themselves an atheist. It’s just that, because I wasn’t 100% sure there was no god, I wasn’t willing to take on that label. Dawn: And so that never went away. And I tried to do things. I remember, in college, in graduate school, I started going to church, Catholic church, and that I went most weeks. It was something to do, and I could say I was trying, but it didn’t do anything for me internally. Nothing about me changed as part of that experience, Well, growing up, the only thing I knew to do was to go to church, in terms of trying to have faith or trying to believe in God. That was the only thing open to me, I thought. And so I tried that, and that didn’t work for me. You know, and again, I think that really speaks to who you are, Dawn, in your desire for intellectual honesty and integrity. Because a lot of people will just take on the identity of atheist and really not think what that means. Like you said, you defined that, in order to be a credible atheist, or to call yourself that, you really have to know everything about all of reality. Dawn: Yeah, right, right. And you understood that. So to be that self limiting, again, speaks to your integrity. And your desire not only, again, just to be sure, but you’re also honest in the fact that you’re continually skeptical. Because you’re constantly searching for the truth, and that is something that I think all of us can take a cue from, is really continuing to search for truth. So as you’re moving along, you have this interesting kind of oxymoron that you’re telling me. It’s like you want to believe, you just can’t because it’s not intellectually credible to you, but yet you’re going through the motions of church, but that doesn’t… It’s just more of a social outing, it sounds like, for you more than anything. Dawn: Mm-hm. So that was college, and you pursued a degree in? Dawn: Biology. In biology. So you were heavily immersed in the sciences at that time. Dawn: Yes, yes. So I would imagine that your naturalistic worldview, that worldview without God, was being reinforced through your study of the sciences. Were you attending to any of that as how it related to the existence or not of God? Dawn: I mean truthfully that didn’t play as much of a role as people think. I mean I specifically remember, in grad school, having this conversation with another person who, if he wasn’t an atheist, he was like me, agnostic leaning atheist, and we were both in the lab, and I remember saying to him, “People that think we have it all figured out don’t know anything about what we do.” I just remember saying, like, “There’s plenty of places for supernatural.” Not that I would be able to say exactly what those places were, but there’s so much unknown, and so I just remember having this kind of discussion. He was kind of philosophically minded, and we were having this discussion about the debate between intelligent design or creationism and then the naturalistic worldview. And we both thought that there was room to be a believer and an evolutionary biologist. Dawn: So even though I was not in that category, I didn’t see inherent contradictions in general. Maybe specific claims, yes. But in general, I thought it isn’t as if we have things all figured out. We have 1% of things figured out. So it’s arrogant to claim that we don’t need anything else. And I was agnostic on whether we needed a supernatural being or not, but I knew there was plenty of unknown. Yeah, I appreciate your humility there. Kind of a modest epistemology, if you will. That you understand our limitations of where we are, and there’s just so much that we don’t know. But we’re always looking to make the best explanation of the things that we do know, right? And experience. Dawn: Right, right. So you were moving along, and I’m curious, too, before we move too far. In embracing this agnostic, atheistic leaning direction, as the critical thinker that you were, were you looking at the implications of that godless worldview and what it meant for you in terms of your life, meaning, purpose, direction, any of that? Dawn: No. So I wasn’t thinking like that exactly. I mean I definitely felt empty without God. But I wasn’t thinking in terms of bigger picture, like what is life without God like? Because that’s what life was for me. So I didn’t have to think, “What would it be if there was no god?” because I already thought there was no god. So I knew what that felt like. And, again, I would have to put that into, like, mystery category. Why do we continue to do anything at all? I don’t know. But there’s a desire to do. So even if there’s no implications later, there still is inherent kind of driving force to do good, be good. But I wasn’t thinking about that in a philosophical sense, just kind of one foot in front of the other, keep moving forward kind of thing. And I was struggling. It’s not as if I was comfortable with that idea. I was struggling. Dawn: And I remember there was a podcast, actually. This was during my postdoc. So after you finish your PhD, scientists often do additional training called a postdoctoral fellowship, and so I was in Canada doing my postdoc, and I heard this podcast about how somebody lost their faith. And it felt very similar to me. They grew up in a Catholic home, and she talked about her brother dying, what that meant, and I just thought, “Well, this is it. This is really what I think, and I finally, finally admit it.” I wasn’t happy about it at all. It was like a punch in the gut. Yeah. But I just thought… I’d been trying really hard not to come to this conclusion, but that’s what I actually really think. And so that’s when—during my postdoc years was when I started, if not to other people, admitting to myself that I didn’t think there was a god. So you were finally closing that door. And so what happened next in your journey? Dawn: So I got this job, the job I currently have, in Kearney, Nebraska. And I came here, and this was a place different from any other place I had lived. Just in general, people are super friendly. I’m also an introvert, so I didn’t always, always appreciate that. I mean I appreciated the sentiment, but I did not appreciate needing to talk to people all the time, or people clear across the street waving, waving, waving, but you don’t know them. And they want to say hello. So extremely friendly, helpful community. And then the second thing is very open about religious beliefs. And that… I really didn’t like that part. So, for example, at the dentist’s office, they’re playing religious music. Go to the coffee shop, there’s Bibles on the table. And I just felt like it was everywhere, and people are so comfortable and so open with their faith. And I didn’t find it pushy in the sense that it wasn’t like people treated me different or were always trying to talk to me about it, but there was just evidence of it everywhere. Dawn: And so I had this thing but the same people were super nice, some of the nicest people I’ve ever met, and so I had this issue where they’re obviously very religious, very, very nice people, seemed happy, had something I didn’t have, or it seemed so, and so then at that point I was like, “Okay, I’ll try church again. Let’s see. I’m going to really give it an A+ effort here.” And so then I started going to the Catholic church, and even at one point I was like, “I’m going to read the Bible straight through.” And so I started at Genesis. It didn’t go super well. I got to Noah’s Ark, and I was done. And so I was kind of in that, and I had stopped. I had stopped going to church. I mean I went, I don’t know, for maybe a couple of months. And there was something… Because I grew up in that environment, there’s something comforting about the ritual, but I didn’t feel any closer to God. What I felt like was I just… I gave it an effort. Like, “I don’t see what these other people are seeing. I wish I did. I don’t see it.” And so this is that point when I met, Tim, actually. So, Dawn, as you’re moving along, then, and you’re in this community that’s very different than what you know, how does your story change? What is it that makes you want to really re-investigate seriously this issue of God? There were a series of letters to the editor in the local paper about evolution. I don’t remember what instigated that exactly, but there was a series of letters and then comments about those letters, and I was just ashamed. I was ashamed by some of the responses coming from people at the university. And I should note that some of these people were using pseudonyms and were behaving very badly, just unkindly and very badly. And then there was this person, Tim Stratton, who was commenting on a lot of them but was kind. I didn’t agree with anything he said, honestly. But he was kind. And was offering… anybody that was writing responses, he was offering to meet with them and talk to them in person, and so I had this impression of this person, Tim Stratton, who I didn’t know who that was at all. That at least he was kind. So, Tim, You were on an opposite end of those who were at the university. I guess it was on the topic of evolution? Is that what you were talking about? Tim: I think that’s right and intelligent design in general. I was, at that point, really new to apologetics. I was a youth pastor at that time, and I saw that many of my students were losing their faith or becoming atheists in front of my face, because I kind of answered their questions. And so I went on a journey to see if there were good answers to their questions. What Dawn noticed was that I was arguing and trying to be nice and respectful and loving at the same time, and I think that got her attention. I do think some of the arguments that I was giving back then are horrible, and I wouldn’t give them anymore, and some of them are still good.  But I like what Dawn says. At the time, she didn’t agree with any of them, but she noticed something in my tone, I guess. Dawn: Yeah, absolutely. You know, that really says something, I think, that even though the content wasn’t exactly perhaps or anything that she agreed with, she appreciated the manner in which you communicated as particularly juxtaposed to those who were her colleagues, who weren’t putting their very best foot forward. Tim: Yeah. So, Dawn, his contribution and his tone, did it cause you to initiate some kind of discussion with him? Tell me what happened after that. Dawn: I think because of this series of articles, my colleague invited someone to come to speak at what’s called a Science Cafe, so it was supposed to be outreach to the public, and the topic was on evolution, and so… before that I thought probably Tim would be there, and I Googled him so I knew what he looked like. Tim: Really? Dawn: Yeah, I did. And so I was on the lookout to meet him. And my only intention was to meet him and tell him I appreciated the tone of his arguments. I mean, I just wanted to thank him for that and to kind of also speak up that we all were not like some of the other people that were responding. And so I met him there, and then, I think within the week, we had connected on Facebook? Tim: I ran into you at Qdoba, the burrito joint. Dawn: Yeah. Tim: Right after that. Dawn: That’s right. We did. We did. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And so then he or I added the other one as a Facebook friend, and then this started a very long series of messages back and forth, like… I think at that point I said, “Actually, I’m closer to an atheist,” and so I was putting all my cards on the table there. And I think, if I go back and look, I bet several times I’m sort of trying to end it, saying, “Thank you so much for your patience!” Just because I didn’t have any kind of… I didn’t think somebody was going to be able to answer my questions. And I didn’t want to waste his time. But the other thing I appreciated very early was that it felt like give and take. So I would not have been as interested in those conversations if it felt like he was teaching me but I wasn’t giving back anything in return. Tim: Oh, yeah! Dawn: So I would ask questions. He would ask questions. And so we sort of came to understand each others’ beliefs that way. So that was kind of the initial part. And it was purely intellectual. I had no, no thought that this was going to lead to some kind of change in my life. And at one point, he said “Maybe God put us in each others’ paths for this reason,” and I remember thinking, like that’s so nice of him to say, but it’s just not going to happen. So, Tim, talk with me about the way that you were… As obviously a thoughtful communicator and really appreciating this conversation you were having with Dawn, what kind of questions or topics or things were you talking about? Were you just question asking? Were you trying to present some kind of evidence or arguments? How was this conversation proceeding? Tim: Yeah. The way I remember it. Like I said, this was when I first started getting into apologetics, and I think at the time I’d just enrolled at Biola University, started my master’s degree in apologetics. So as I was getting stuff from my classes, I was giving it right to Dawn, and so I was offering the Kalam cosmological argument and the moral argument and the ontological argument and the fine tuning argument, any argument I could get my hands on. As I was learning it, she was basically learning it along with me. And I was even trying to argue against evolution at that point, too, and then she asked me if I’d be willing to read some books on it, and I’m like, “Sure,” so she gave me some books to read. I remember one in particular from Jerry Coyne, right? Dawn: Yeah. Tim: And I was reading through that. If we’re going to be taken seriously, we better understand that which we are arguing against,” and I realized that I hadn’t done so. And so I really appreciated learning about evolution from Dawn, and I wasn’t just going to reject it. I figured if she was willing to listen to me, I’d better be willing to listen to her, and I learned a lot in the process. And while at Biola, then, I started thinking about, “Wow! Could an omniscient and omnipotent God create via evolution?” and it seemed to me that if God was both omnipotent and omniscient that He could. He would have the power to do so, and He would know how to do it. And I think you could even relate this to the fine tuning argument, the fine tuning of the initial conditions of the big bang or the early universe. So I didn’t see a problem there. Not that I necessarily said I affirm this view, but I kind of had Dawn in mind. I wanted to see, could I come up with a model here, for Dawn’s sake, Long story short, I was willing to learn from Dawn, and I think… So being willing to learn from her and listen to her and the fact that the tone was good, that we were respectful to each other and we weren’t like, “You stupid idiot!” I think those two things worked in favor of us having a really good conversation, and she was then willing to listen to me. Over a long period of time, I felt like almost daily we’d have some interaction, over Facebook Messenger most of the time, and argue. Facebook is bad for tons of reasons, but I always point to this as something good that happened because of it. And I know it was definitely a very intense time, because I was really wrestling with big issues at that point. It’s curious because it sounds like you started the conversation really not wanting to be convinced. Dawn: Yeah. But there must have been a tipping point at some point, where you actually found the person who was willing to engage in doubts and questions in a serious way and a respectful way, and so it was the first time in your life, I think, that perhaps you—you not only felt safe, I guess, to do that, but also somehow with a renewed interest. It was initially just intellectual, and there were some of these arguments that I had heard a little bit of because of the class, because of teaching evolution, that sometimes we do this part where we talk about common objections at the end, and I try to just let students talk, and I try not to talk so much, but I needed to understand the objections, and so initially I thought, “This will be great for that. He’ll be able to explain some of these objections that I just don’t understand.” And so initially… And I had done some work. I had gotten some books to try and understand that, but I just couldn’t quite get it. And so initially that’s what I thought it was going to be, is that he’ll help me understand the opposing arguments and then that’ll be great and that’ll be that. But then we started going through… The argument that convinced me was when Tim was developing his Free Thinking argument against naturalism, so it’s kind of the early stages of that, so we were going through those premises and arguing a lot, and at one point it blindsided me. Dawn: I mean, so it’s intellectual, intellectual, intellectual, and then one night, and I was getting ready to move, and I wasn’t sleeping. This was like 3:00 in the morning, and I was packing, and I was just thinking, “Gosh! I really think we have free will,” like, “I can’t be certain. I can’t be certain.” So this was one of the things also that would not have worked for me if Tim did not make clear that we don’t have to be certain, that you can have some doubt and still be convinced. So I was like, “I can’t be certain about free will.” I had tried and I was making myself crazy trying to think of, “What experiments could we do to show that there’s free will?” and just could not and had read scientific literature of people trying to show it and just couldn’t figure out a way to definitively know. Dawn: But I had this revelation that, “Oh, I think we do have free will,” and then the very next thing was, “What does that mean?” That means there’s God. And then it was like… yeah. I get a little bit emotional talking about it because it was… Like I said, I felt blindsided by it because it was all intellectual until we had gone through the arguments, so I knew the argument well. I just was stuck on this… I thought either we think we have free will or we do have free will. And I just… I have to live my life with what I think is true, and what I think is true is we have free will, and if we free will, there’s a God. And I was just… I didn’t know what to do with that. I was crazed that night. When you have that sense of… like this is profound and this is actually true and perhaps God does exist, I’m sure that’s a very sobering moment for you in many ways because you had, for so long, not believed. I mean really your whole life. Dawn: Right, right. Tim, for those who don’t know the free will argument, really that’s a novel thing for someone to think about. “What do you mean I don’t have free will?” or, “If I have free will, that means there’s a God.” Could you, in a nutshell, just tell us what that is. Tim: You bet. So the free thinking argument is an argument that demonstrates… Well, the free thinking argument against naturalism. It starts out just by saying, if naturalism is true, that the human soul does not exist, right? Because the human soul would be a non-natural or a supernatural, immaterial, nonphysical type of thing, so if naturalism is true, the soul does not exist. And then I would say, but if the soul does not exist, then humans do not possess libertarian freedom because everything about humanity would be caused and determined by something other than humanity, namely the laws and forces and events of nature. Tim: So yeah, number one, if naturalism is true, we don’t have a soul. Number two, if the soul does not exist, libertarian freedom does not exist. Three, if libertarian freedom does not exist, then important kinds of rationality and knowledge do not exist. That is, if something causally determines you to affirm a false belief about X, then it’s impossible for you to infer a better or true belief about X, and I think that hit Dawn hard because the goal of the scientist is to infer the best explanation from all the data. But if something else is causally determining her to affirm a false belief about X, then she can’t infer the best explanation of the data. She can’t do science, right? Tim: But then the next premise is we can infer better and true beliefs. We can do science. So therefore you have some conclusions. Therefore, humans possess libertarian freedom. Therefore, the soul or some non-natural aspect of humanity seems to exist. Therefore, naturalism is false, and then I argue that the best—speaking of the best explanation, that the best explanation of all of this data, souls and libertarian freedom, is not just God but the biblical view of God, and that really starts a new argument. Yeah. Thank you for explaining that. So then, Dawn, back to you. When you had this sudden awareness or realization that you actually believed, what happened then? Did you call Tim? Did you think, “Oh, I need to think about this,” or what next? Or what kind of God? I’m sure I wrote to him immediately. And then I think… Again, he was still helping me know what to do. And so he suggested that I start with the book of John, that I read and also just pray to God, which was novel. Tim: Notice that I didn’t say, “Start with Genesis.” Dawn: No, you did not say start with Genesis. Tim: I know that wasn’t going to be good for her. Dawn: And so then the next part was kind of… So there is a God. Is it the Christian God? Right. Dawn: So Tim was, at that time, teaching a Sunday school class on apologetics, and so I started… I wouldn’t go to church, but I would go to that. And so we went through Dr. Craig’s book On Guard, I think, and went through all the arguments there, and then a pivotal moment or time was he showed this debate between Mike Licona and Bart Ehrman, and I remember, oh, boy, I was rooting for Ehrman. So he showed this… I just… I mean because I just… I don’t know what my deal is, dragging my feet every step of the way. Tim: The resurrection in general. Dawn: The resurrection, yeah. The resurrection. How can that not be true? And I again just… It’s not that I was sure, but I was more sure than not, so I was… Tim and I would often talk about percentage. What percentage sure are you?  And so I was above 50% sure. I don’t know how high, but the idea was that that’s the thing that I thought was true. Whether I was 100% convinced or not, that’s the way I needed to live my life at that point. So I think that was in the spring, so when we first starting talking in the fall of 2012, I think, and then in the spring was when I was going through the classes with him, and then we watched the debate during that time. And I still wasn’t calling myself a Christian yet. And then I had a question… Yeah, I had a question to Tim about the resurrection, like why did Jesus have to die? It didn’t make sense to me that there wouldn’t be some other way. And he gave a sermon at church about that, and so then after that sermon, then I started calling myself Christian. That was the final thing that I needed answered. That is a really tremendous question. And I think it’s really a stumbling block for many people. Why did Jesus have to die? And I don’t know if you want to give a little 60-second response to that. Basically it had to do with how our broken relationship’s restored. What does the offended party have to do? What does the offending party have to do? And really cached that out and connected a whole bunch of logical dots. Dawn: Yeah. Tim: And yeah, I think you can make a pretty good case that, “Wow, this is why the Creator of the universe had to enter into the universe to die for those who He loved within the universe.” You know, as we are going on, it just strikes me how perfectly God placed you, Tim, in Dawn’s life as someone who is incredibly logical and analytical. And you obviously are made from the same cloth. And you’re able to think through things in such a way—you don’t just say, “Believe!” You know, “Why don’t you just believe?” Tim: Right. That’s what I used to do. As a former youth pastor and a bad youth pastor, that’s what I did. Yeah. Tim: And I realized that doesn’t work. Yeah. Dawn: Yeah. Because, for especially the skeptic, they just don’t take things just because you throw them out. You have to have a good reason. And it sounds like you were the perfect person in her life who—it’s not that you knew all the answers, but you’re willing to look and engage and learn alongside and you’re both searching for truth but in a very deep, logical, and analytical way, and there’s something to be said for that, and it’s really a beautiful thing. So you came to a place not only that you believed intellectually, Dawn, that God exists and obviously you were convinced at some point that Jesus rose from the dead and perhaps that verified the claims that He, too, was God. But that it was more than an intellectual assent. It was something that you… Someone to whom you gave your life. Dawn: Right. And affiliated and you were willing to put on that label of Christian. That was a tremendous change. Dawn: Yeah. Talk with me about that and the change that has come in your life as a result of really becoming a Christ follower. Dawn: Yeah. So this is a harder part to talk about for me. I think partially because of my personality and also because of my job, I was not super excited to use the term at all. And just the other part that was difficult, well difficult about, “What does this mean?” was that I’m not sure if my family are believers, and most of my friends are not believers, and so there was one point that… I mean, I was disturbed. I was distressed by my conclusion. So it wasn’t like all rainbows. I mean, I felt pretty bad about it for a while. Like you had said, for me it wasn’t enough just to say, “Believe.” It seems like for plenty of people it is, but for me, I needed more, and God gave me more. Dawn: So there are so many gifts that I’ve been given, but I don’t often feel like I do enough with those gifts, but in terms of how it’s changed my life, I wouldn’t even be thinking like this. I would just… Let’s rewind to when I was saying one foot in front of the other. I’ve always tried to be a kind person, but there’s a different obligation to that, to helping others and living your life for more than just yourself, and that’s… It just changes, so I don’t know if it has changed my actions as much as the mindset of why I do things or what things I try to keep in mind as I live my life. Yeah, yeah. It’s an ongoing process for all of us, Dawn, isn’t it? I mean, every day is a gift even- Dawn: Yeah, yeah. … and time is a gift and what we do with that, it’s a struggle for us all. I’m imagining that there are listeners who are curious about your perspective, too. It may be very much like Tim’s in terms of what would you say to the person who doesn’t understand how science and faith can go together? They look at you. You’re a PhD in evolutionary biology, or molecular evolution, but yet you call yourself a Christian, a believer in God. How do you reconcile those or put those together? Or is there a problem at all? Dawn: I don’t think there’s a problem at all. I separated out, and I teach my students this, that in science we use methodological naturalism, such that, by definition, we’re studying the natural world. Biology is the study of life. So what’s outside of the natural world isn’t in science. Not that there’s no influence of supernatural but that, just by definition, the rules of science are we do not include that. So if I’m in a lab and I’m doing an experiment and I can’t figure out why, we can’t jump to supernatural influence. We wouldn’t make progress. It’s separate from whether or not you think there are supernatural influences. You can believe that there is and still not take it into account because the process of… We have a process that we use to make progress, and so, for me, not that they don’t intersect, but the way that I look at science or the way I do my job, it doesn’t come into it. I’m trying to be as objective as possible, making the inference with the best explanation. Dawn: I mean, in my life, every single thing I do, I try to make the inference with the best explanation. And I’ve never really seen the problem. And I think also because I’m a scientist, I’m pretty used to ideas changing with more information, and so I don’t get hung up on on that. And I think it’s arrogant to think that we will figure all this out. On either end, that we’ll know God’s mind or that, as a scientist, I’m going to be able to recreate what happened billions of years ago. I mean it’s arrogant to think we’re ever going to reach that step, but if you have a possibility, that should give you reason to believe that reconciliation is possible. Tim: And I think Dawn’s exactly right. When she’s going into the lab, she’s, for lack of maybe a better term, assuming methodological naturalism. She’s not looking for supernatural everywhere. Dawn: Yes. Right, right, right. Tim: Even though she believes in God and that God created the universe and everything. Dawn: Right, right. Tim: I mean Psalm 19:1-2 says, “Day after day, your creation pours forth speech. Night after night, it delivers knowledge.” Dawn: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Tim: So God’s word is telling us, “Study nature. Do science,” right? That’s what the Bible is saying. Dawn: Yeah. Tim: Do science, study what God has created. So if you study the nature that God has created, it’s not necessary to look for… What’s the term that you like to use? Tinkering? Dawn: Tinkerer, yeah. Tim: The Tinkering God or whatever. No need to look for that once you affirm that He already created it supernaturally. Dawn: Yeah. And actually that’s another thing, is that I think that’s one of God’s greatest gifts, to me personally but to humanity in general, is that He allows to figure some of this out. We get a glimpse. We can use our brains, and He gives us enough resources to be able to make inferences for the best explanation and understand how He created. I mean I just… That’s the part where faith comes into my work, that part, is that I’ll just be blown away just at what we’re able to figure out. It didn’t have to be that way. We didn’t have to have these tools to be able to make inferences. He gave us this gift. That’s right. All the more reason to really appreciate that free thinking argument, right? Dawn: Yep. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. You have to have a grounded rationality because you can observe a predictable, rational universe and all of that. Tim: That’s right. So it all comes together. As we’re wrapping up, I think I would like to hear really from both of you in terms of advice that you would give to someone like yourself, Dawn, who is just a skeptic at heart. Someone who really is looking for truth and wants to have valid reason and rationality for their belief. They want to have grounded, warranted belief. What would you say or how would you advice someone like yourself? Or who might be searching with that kind of intentionality and thoughtfulness? Dawn: I think one of the things that helped me a lot early is when I came to that conclusion, exactly that. I’m just looking for truth. Whatever way it goes is what I’m going to believe. I don’t have to be invested in there not being a God or there being a God. I can just simply say, “I’m looking for evidence, and I’m going to come to the conclusion that makes most sense to me.” And so that takes a lot of pressure off and takes a lot of emotion out of it, which I think often is a hang-up for that, so I mean if you have the idea in your head that you’re just looking for the truth… Also, you can think for yourself. So maybe you really admire one person, but that person, there’s part of the arguments you don’t like. Well, it doesn’t have to be the whole thing or nothing. You can look for pieces of evidence all over. Dawn: I tell Tim this all the time, that there’s all of these arguments for the existence of God. I think about three of them are good. So I mean I’m not an easy sell, and I’m not convinced… I don’t care if there’s a hundred. If there’s one that is convincing to me, then I go with it. Tim: That’s all you need. Yeah. Anything you would add as advice to the skeptic, Tim? Anything you would encourage them? To the skeptic, I’d say really evaluate your life and even in your innermost being and your subconscious thoughts, even, if you can. Are you resisting the Holy Spirit? Are you resisting the arguments? Are you resisting? I know many people who’ve said, “Look, I want God to exist. I don’t want atheism to be true,” but then when you start arguing with them, even in a polite way, they get very emotional and defensive, and it seems clear to me, “Well, you are not a nonresistant nonbeliever,” and Dawn seemed to me to get to the point where, at least I thought she is definitely a nonresistant nonbeliever, and if that’s the case, then she was going to be open. Some times more than others. Yes, she is the most skeptical person I’ve ever met! To this day! No matter what we’re talking about. Skeptical! And I think it’s a gift, though. Tim: And sometimes maybe I’m too optimistic, and so her pushing back on my optimism with a little bit of skepticism is good, and I think we’ve been able to meet in the middle on so many things. And so then I would just say to those who are having conversations with skeptics or nonbelievers in general don’t wipe the dust off your feet too quickly. I see too many Christians just say, “Well, I had a conversation with them once, and I’m wiping the dust off of my feet and walking away,” to quote scripture. I just last week was with somebody who led his friend to Christ after 30 years of sharing the gospel and doing apologetics with him. Thirty years! This man finally accepted the truth and accepted the evidence. Followed the evidence where it was leading and gave his life to Christ. Tim: And, Dawn, I felt like our conversation was a long time, but it wasn’t close to 30 years. I mean it was several years, though, right? Dawn: The bulk of it was a year. Tim: Okay. Dawn: I had questions for a long, long time after that. Tim: Right, right. Dawn: So I mean it was several years, but from agnostic-leaning atheist to Christian was right around a year. Tim: Okay. Dawn: But hundreds of pages of texts. Tim: Yeah, that’s right. Maybe that needs to become a book. Yeah. Tim: We have it. Tim: We might have to publish that. We’ll see. I don’t know. We’ll have to edit it, that’s for sure. Dawn: Edit it for sure! Tim: Yeah. There are some things that I’m sure I said back then that I would be ashamed of now. But I’m sure God can use imperfect arguments at times, too. So just keep having the conversation and love each other and respect each other and don’t be jerks. Dawn: Yeah. Tim: And even some of Dawn’s colleagues, one guy in particular, we used to probably hate each other, but now we’ve even kind of developed a friendship with each other. We stopped being jerks to each other and are able to have these conversations. And so, yeah, just have fun conversations, and at the end of the day, trust God with it. But you gain friends and develop critical thinking skills in the process. For me, it strengthened. Dawn came to faith in Christ. My faith in Christ was strengthened, and it seemed to expand. I saw a bigger view of our Maximally Great Being through the process as well. That’s wonderful! Wonderful advice both ways, both to skeptics and to Christians, Tim. And finally, Dawn, if you were to talk to the Christian, especially with the example that Tim was in your life, patient, kind, diligent, very thoughtful and intelligent, meeting you where you were, open, all of those things, how would you advice the Christian to engage with the nonbeliever, maybe perhaps the nonresistant nonbeliever. Dawn: That may not be nonresistant? That may or may not be resistant, I guess. Dawn: I mean the biggest thing, I guess, was just to show humility and to show… You don’t have to be sure, you know? You can learn from each other not to… I don’t know… think less of a person that has doubts? And to make them feel like the doubting part is okay. That was huge, that I knew it was okay to doubt. I mean, if he would’ve said, “At some point, you’re going to be 100% certain,” I would’ve said, “Okay, we’re done.” You know? This idea that certainty isn’t the goal. I mean, we’re not trying to be certain. We’re trying to have a relationship. Relationship with God. It’s not about being 100% certain, and so those were the huge things. And just, yeah, to be kind. I mean it shouldn’t be so hard, but that’s… Think the best you can of the other person. Yeah. I’ve heard… This is actually wisdom from my husband, that we have a hermeneutic of either trust or suspicion towards the other. And I think, to your point, I think that we do need to trust, really, that the other person is coming from a good place until they demonstrate otherwise. Dawn: Right. Until they prove otherwise. Right. Yeah. It’s kind of innocent until proven guilty. Because we really do want the best for the other. That’s what love is, and some of that’s just being patient, and it’s giving the benefit of the doubt. So wow. What an amazing story this is, and how rich it has been to have both of you in the conversation today, to give life to your story, Dawn, and to Tim, just to bring such insight and wisdom in how you walked alongside—both of you. You’re walking together in this process. And I think that humility and that respect, mutual respect, really stands out a lot. So thank you so much for, again, your time and just coming forward and telling your story. Like you said, it’s not an easy thing to do necessarily. Dawn: Right. Especially as a professional as an evolutionary biologist and someone in the academic world. So I applaud you, Dawn. It’s courageous. So thank you. Dawn: I appreciate that. Thank you. All right. And thank you, Tim, of course. Tim: You bet. My pleasure. Yes. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Dawn Simon’s story. You can find out more about Dawn and Tim Stratton, as well as their recommended resources, in our 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 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.

A strong atheist until he was 51, Mark Meckler felt no need for God until the influence of his personal relationships paired with deep intellectual curiosity led him to consider something more. Recommended book: The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who unexpectedly became a Christian to learn from their perspectives, both as someone who once resisted belief in God and then as someone who changed their mind. What we think and believe is a complex phenomenon. We often come to our beliefs because they’re part of our world growing up, the fabric of our family, the views of our friends. We seem to be drawn to what is familiar, at least at first. Sometimes we actually reject what we know and become drawn to other views based upon what we desire, or towards the beliefs of those who we like and admire believe. We can also be swayed towards strong beliefs by dominant voices in our culture at university and beyond, when exposed to different ways of thinking about and viewing the world, towards or away from God and religion.  In our story today, Mark Meckler’s nonreligious cultural Judaism grew into a militant atheism, as influenced by the dominating voices of the New Atheists. As a young adult, he became convinced of the poisonous, immoral nature of religious belief and wanted nothing to do with it. Religion was for weak people who needed a crutch. Highly driven and accomplished in his life and career, over the years, he didn’t feel the need for God. He was happy on his own. But against all odds, he became a Christian after three decades of atheism. This begs the question, what would it take for someone like Mark to become open to consider the possibility of God? Even more than that, to become an impassioned follower of Jesus Christ. I hope you’ll listen to find out the answers at least for Mark. Even more than that, I hope you’ll stay to the end to hear his advice to skeptics in considering becoming open to ideas that they may have readily dismissed and to Christians on how to live in a way that invites the skeptic to reconsider.  Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mark. It’s so great to have you.  It’s really great to be here. It’s an honor. Thanks for having me today. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners can know more of who you are, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?  My name’s Mark Meckler, and I run a national political organization called Convention of States Action, about five million members. I’m trained as an attorney, but I am a political activist for a living and for my passion now. I married to Patty for 28 years. We live just north of Austin, Texas. I have two grown kids. My son is 26 years old, in his last year of law school in the Washington, DC, area. My daughter is 22, another political warrior, and she lives here in Austin, Texas, with us, and she runs the education reform project for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Also, you might have seen my dog in the background back there. That’s Levi, and he is a 160-pound Great Dane. He’s a permanent fixture here in the office with me. Wow! You couldn’t have a greater companion. I’ve got two Golden Retrievers, so I know what that’s all about.  Let’s step back and lay a context for your story, your story that brought you to place of atheism and then to God. Tell me about your childhood. Where did you grow up? Tell me about your family, your community, culture. Was God any part of that world? So I grew up in southern California, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, and I grew up in a very what I would describe as Judeo-Christian family from a value set perspective. I’m Jewish from both sides of my family. The whole’s family from Ukraine, grandparents on one side, great grandparents on the other side. Jewish culture was very important in our family. I would say, in my high school, 50% of the kids were Jewish. A lot of folks went to temple. I would now, in hindsight, call it ritualistic Judaism. Not much God involved. Really wasn’t much about faith, more about family, community, tradition. Those things were strong in my family, but there was no God in my family, per se. There was no prayer, there was no worship, and we as a family never went to temple. So you didn’t go to temple, so did you practice Shabbat or high holy days?  None of that. Once in a while, for Passover, for some of the high holidays, we might go to somebody else’s house, one of the older relatives who still practiced that kind of stuff, but we really didn’t participate in it, and I really frankly, as a kid, didn’t understand any of the meaning of it. We would read prayers that had been translated from Hebrew to English. Sometimes the older folks might say a prayer or two in Hebrew. I mean, to me it just sounded weird. My weird relatives who were into this stuff, and I love them dearly. It was fun for the kids, and we would get treats, and that’s pretty much all it was about for me growing up. So you didn’t go to Hebrew school? You didn’t have a bar mitzvah or any of that?  No, all that stuff was offered to me, but the way it really works in what I would call a really nontraditional Jewish community, non-orthodox community, is you get to be about twelve years old, and then your parents say, “Hey, you’re going to be bar mitzvahed,” and usually, you’re like, “Well, I don’t really want to, but I will if I have to,” because we were a part of a temple community. But for me, I didn’t want to do. And the main reason I didn’t want to do it is my friends who did it all got a bunch of money. This sounds weird, but cash is the primary gift that people get for their bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, and I felt like, to me, that just seemed kind of weird and sacrilegious. I didn’t believe in God, I was not a practicing Jew, and I was going to have a big party where I put on religious garb, sort of pretended that I was religious so I could get money. And that actually felt wrong to me at the time. I don’t know that I expressed it that articulately, but I told my parents, “I’m not really interested in this,” and my parents were okay with that. So your parents were nonpracticing Jews. Did they have an expressed atheism or disbelief in God, even though they were part of a, I guess culturally speaking, of a religious sect? Judaism?  Yeah. I mean in a sense there’s two questions wrapped up into one there that I want to address. First of all, it’s just my parents in particular. They had a decision they had made when they were younger and a philosophy that they were going to kind of turn it on us and ask us, “Well, what do you think?” as opposed to telling us what to think. And so we were raised in a household that was very open to whatever you might think but non imposing of any particular religious orientation. Again, important to remember the values were there. Everything that you would think about as Judeo-Christian values, we lived according to the commandments essentially, but it was not expressed in religious terminology. So that’s where we came from philosophically. There’s a very different, I think, distinction that has to be made for folks who didn’t grow up in a religious home because, it’s hard to understand this, but being Jewish is both a race and a religion. And so I don’t have a choice, I’m Jewish. That is what I am. That will never change. Every day of my life, I wear a Star of David. Mine has a cross in the middle of it now, so that I understand where the heart is, right? But I’m Jewish, and that can never change. I can’t renounce my Judaism any more than I could renounce the fact that I’m a Caucasian person, right? That just is part of who I am genetically speaking, literally. And there’s a culture associated with being Jewish if you choose to participate in that culture. And I did. My family was very Jewish culturally. We ate traditionally Jewish foods quite often. Like I discussed a little bit, we went occasionally to Passover, things like this, and if you’ve been deep in Jewish culture, families behave a certain way, same as there might be an Italian culture or a Greek culture. So we were very culturally Jewish. My parents were very proud of that, were always very proud of being Jewish. They were not religiously Jewish, so this is—even when I married my wife. She’s from an Irish Catholic family. She said, “Oh, it’s kind of like being Irish and Catholic,” and I said, “No, because it’s not a nation. I’m not Jewish because my parents or my grandparents are from some particular region of the world that had a particular political ideology. This is my genetic lineage. I’m from the line of the Jews,” and so it is an actual race of people. I always felt Jewish. I still feel very Jewish today. But I was never religiously Jewish. My dad, I came to know later in life, was a serious atheist. He still is. My mom is what I would describe as a deist. She absolutely believes in God. She believes that God has a role in our lives. But she’s not accepted Jesus Christ, and she doesn’t necessarily believe in the Abrahamic God in any sense of the word. Thank you for that clarification. I think that it does make things clear to understand that there’s a cultural and almost genetic heritage. There’s a familial heritage of Judaism, and there’s also a religion associated with that. It sounds like, if 50% of the people in your high school were Jewish, you were really steeped in Jewish community. I’m curious. Were there any Christians around in your upbringing at all?  Oh, yeah. I mean, there were lots of Christians in my high school and lots of Jews. I went to temple occasionally on a Friday night because I had friends who were Jewish, and it was really a social event, mostly, for the young people. It was a place to gather on a Friday night. And because I had friends who were Christians, occasionally I’d spend a Saturday night slumber party over at somebody’s house, and Sunday morning, I’d go to church with them. So I was exposed from a religious perspective to both Judaism and Christianity. But for you, what was religion? Whether it was Christianity or Judaism, obviously it wasn’t something you believed that was real or true or worth your life or belief. What did you think it was?  Yeah. As I became old enough to actually consider it, you know, which really as I got into high school and started thinking about these things, to me, I would describe religion, what I would’ve said back then is it’s a crutch for people who need it. I wasn’t offended by it per se. I just felt like, “Look, I’m a good person. I live a good life. My parents are really good people who taught me the right values, so that’s for people who are struggling to understand that there are things that are unexplainable, that we don’t understand the cosmos, and so they want to call those things that they don’t understand God,” or, “Things happen that seem like a wild coincidence or couldn’t possibly happen. They want to call those things miracles.” To me, it seemed like a crutch for people who couldn’t deal with the fact that there were unanswerable questions. And a lot of the stories that I’ve heard about coming to faith, people came to faith during times of trauma in their lives. And so that made sense to me. I’d think, “Well, when you don’t know where else to turn, you would turn to God.” I mean it’s so true now! In hindsight, right? But I thought it in sort of a negative way. Like, instead of just saying, “Hey, I’ve just got to figure out how to deal with this,” you’re going to turn to this invisible force that you can’t see or explain. To me, honestly, it just sort of seemed weak. So it really wasn’t a rejecting. It was just an embracing of, I guess, a more realistic understanding of life? You didn’t need that kind of thing. You didn’t need God. You didn’t need the crutch of religion. At what point did you- Yeah. A terrible mistake in hindsight, but that’s really where I was at as a high school kid. Yeah. So when did you actually embrace the understanding or identity as an atheist?  Really in college is when I came strongly to atheism. I was fascinated by religion in the sense that I love people, I’m fascinated by people. I’ve always loved history and politics and sociology, so if you look at the world and you want to understand the world broadly writ, then you have to understand faith and religion. Because it plays a role as far back as we can go in recorded history, and it always has and it always will. It plays a major role, perhaps the most major role. It plays a role in the formation of countries, in human being’s lives, in geopolitical realities, and so, if you don’t study that stuff, you can’t understand humanity. So when I went to college I took religion classes, not because I was a religious person, but I wanted to understand. I didn’t know anything really about Christianity or Judaism or Islam, Abrahamic religions or any religions, for that matter. Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, you name it. I knew nothing about that stuff. And so I wanted to take classes to understand that. I went to San Diego State University, a pretty classic, regular, public-funded university in San Diego. I went because it was a great party school, to be honest with you. It was not intellectual rigor I was seeking. But as I took these religion classes, what I found out in these classes was I was taught that the greatest force for evil in the history of humanity was Christianity, that more people had died in the name of Christianity than any other religion on the face of the earth, that the Crusades had been this incredible period of grotesque excess and torture and conversion at the point of the sword and all of the stuff that is, partially at least, true about the Crusades. Certainly all that stuff took place historically. But I was taught it without any context. There was no reason. Why did the Crusades happen? I was never taught what happened right before the Crusades, which is 400 years of Ottoman domination, Muslim domination, across the continent of Europe, the torture, the excess, the conversion, the rape, the pillage. I wasn’t taught any of that stuff. So what I learned out of context was that Christianity itself, as a doctrine, had brought all this evil upon the face of the earth and that the earth would be a much better place without it. So I became a pretty strident atheist, and I would argue even further I became what I would call a militant and even a mean atheist. I refer to myself today… I’m Paul. I mean, from the bad side of Paul. I’m the worst among you. And I would’ve been a persecutor in the day, honestly. I can relate to Paul. I thought those people were stupid and crazy and frankly evil, that they fostered an evil ideology, and if they didn’t understand that, it was only because they were ignorant. It sounds like you were influenced by the New Atheists thinkers.  Absolutely. Yes. And your professors must have been promoting the same.  Yes. And that was really… I’m happy to say that, as you follow it today, the atheist movement has largely died out. The New Atheists thinkers, the great thinkers of the atheist movement, they’re not speaking anymore. Even the modern ones have realized that, whether they believe it or not is a different question, but it’s a moral dead end. It leads to nowhere good. And so they’re really not speaking out anymore. Back then, that was the heyday of atheist thinking. And it was being taught institutionally on campuses, and yeah, I drank a big dose of it from a fire hose. Wow. So you graduated college. I guess you were still living with this mentality of the evil nature of Christianity and religion generally, that it poisons everything, as Christopher Hitchens says.  Yep. So how long did you live with this kind of mentality? Into your young adulthood?  In hindsight, not just because I’ve become a believer, but in hindsight it’s horrifying because of how intellectually vacuous I would say I was. That here is, I think, the most important question that faces any human being. Why am I here? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? And I was providing for myself and in judgment of others around me the most simplistic of answers while actually doing no research. And I’ve always considered myself an intellectual person. I’m a reader. You can see my library behind me. I have thousands of books here. I love to read. I’ve always been this way, since I was a little kid, so to take this kind of position on the most important things in human existence, without having done any homework, without having really read the Bible, read the Koran, read the Hadith, read things like that. To take those positions. Frankly, to be honest, I wasn’t even reading the great atheistic thinkers. It was this simple, easy answer, like, “There’s no God. That’s for weak, stupid, evil people, so I’m an atheist.” And that was really the depth of my intellectual analysis. Pretty embarrassing in hindsight. Well, you know, you were taught that by probably people you respected. It probably agreed with your desire to live the way that you wanted perhaps. I’m curious. In embracing atheism, you said you were intellectually minded, you loved to read, but that you perhaps didn’t read the great atheists in terms of truly understanding the implications of atheism, or that worldview, or even the grounding of atheism. Did you venture into that? Did you consider, as an intellectual person, where atheism goes? Other than it’s a rejection of religion, but what is atheism actually?  Yeah, no. Not at all. No consideration at all. Again, this is why, in hindsight, I look back at that person, and if I was talking to myself back then, I would say, “You’re kind of an intellectual embarrassment. You don’t know anything, and you’re drawing conclusions, and your conclusions have consequences, and you’re not following your conclusions to their logical consequences.” If I were talking to old me, I would say, “What have you read? What have you considered? What comes of what you believe?” And there was literally zero consideration. It was very hedonistic to be honest with you. And I don’t mean that in the sense that I just wanted to enjoy earthly pleasures. I mean it in the sense that I was just indulging my own thoughts. Because my thinking was, “Look, I think I’m a pretty good person, and I think I lead a pretty good life, and so I don’t really need God. So why would I spend any time on this? I’ve made my decision. There is no God. I don’t need God.” And so it was very internally focused. It was me focused, I focused. It had nothing to do with any other consequences. So you weren’t bothered by those existential questions, like, “What happens to you when you die?” “What about bigger purpose or meaning in life?” How to ground certain things, like your own free will or consciousness or even your own moral conscience?  No. And again, I feel like speaking across the decades to a different person, which I was before I was saved. There was zero of that. There was zero intellectual curiosity. There was zero worry. For me, it was so simple. I didn’t need it, so it didn’t matter. I didn’t feel the need. I wasn’t in a dark place. I wasn’t seeking salvation. I didn’t feel like I needed to be saved, and so I would say, if I had been able to talk to myself back then, my response would be, “Why would I spend any time with that stuff? I know there’s no God. Nothing happens after I die. I live a pretty good life. I’m a good person. And I’m happy. So what does the rest of it matter?” Yeah. It just is completely irrelevant. Not even worth consideration.  Yep. So as you’re moving along, walk us along your journey. What made you stop and reconsider, perhaps, your perspective?  Well, I think a couple of big turning points in my life. So one was I got married straight out of law school. I was still absolutely an atheist, got married out of law school. That marriage lasted a year and a half and was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. There’s a lot of depth in that I didn’t understand anything about people, to be honest with you. My wife came from a badly dysfunctional, alcoholic family. There was a lot of that wrapped into it. And that was the first of what I would describe as any kind of a dark period in my life. My parents have been married forever. They’re past 60 years married now. And I was expecting I would get married and I would be married forever. My grandparents were married forever, and strangely, even in Los Angeles, most of my friends’ parents had been married lifelong marriages, so that was my personal framework. That was my own view of myself, was as a married person. So when I ended up divorced after a year and a half, it was really personally devastating. That was the first time in my life I’d gone through what I would describe as a dark place. And it has nothing to do… I didn’t seek God there. I didn’t feel like I needed that. It’s not what I looked for. But on my way out of that, I met my wife, my current wife. We’ve been married, it will be 28 years on the 28th of this month, and she was a person of faith, and she had grappled with big questions, and she had studied her own faith, and she had been through much more stuff than me. She was six years younger and way more than six years wiser than I was, to be honest with you. And she sort of plucked me out of the rubble and started a little bit to open my eyes. And so that was the first turning point. The big turning point in my life came after we got married and my son Jacob was born. And I remember standing in his bedroom one night, looking in his crib, as every parent does, and watching him just breathing quietly in the night and thinking, “That’s a miracle. That’s not just biology. That’s not just a sperm and an egg. That’s life! That doesn’t just happen. Something miraculous is right there,” and I had that feeling, and I would say now, in hindsight, that’s the Holy Spirit saying, “I want to show you something. I want you to see this, and I want you to acknowledge this.” I didn’t become a person of faith, but that started to open my heart to a journey of faith, realizing there’s things that I just don’t understand that I want to try to understand. So it was humbling, in a sense, and who can deny almost the miraculous nature of a child? It really seems just so incomprehensible that something so beautiful, someone so beautiful can come from your own body. And I can see, and I’ve heard other stories similarly, that it just seems so beyond what an atheistic view could explain. But you said that your wife kind of picked you up out of the rubble. You had spoken of cultural Christians in the past, but somehow it sounds like the way that you’re speaking of your wife is qualitatively different.  You said that there was something more thoughtful, something deeper or more profound in her faith that you had seen earlier that opened your eyes to perhaps that there’s something different? Or more? Or about Christianity that drew you in or at least opened you up?  Yeah. I wish it was that simple and that fast. I’m a very slow learner, and she’s a very patient woman. It really wasn’t her faith. It was just her general demeanor, and her ability to love me despite my lack of faith was a big deal. I knew she was a person of faith, and she was willing to love me and to bring me into her heart despite my faith. Honestly, I could never understand that. Even today, I can’t understand that. It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s just a blessing from God. I think there’s a difficult place and a special place in the Lord’s heart for people who are willing to marry people not of faith. I don’t recommend it, honestly. I tell people you shouldn’t do that. She was willing to love me, and she’d never even met a Jewish person before, and she would tell you that, when she met me and started hanging out with me, she said to her friends, “I know he’s not a Christian, but I’ve never met a more Christian man in how he lives his life and his personal ethos and the things that he believes. Aside from knowing the Lord and loving the Lord, the entire rest of the framework is there more than anybody I’ve ever met.” So that’s what she saw in me was God’s plan, not necessarily God’s light because I hadn’t accepted God’s light. And what I saw in her is a person who was just wise. She had a wisdom beyond her years. And I didn’t attach that to her faith. I didn’t think, “Oh, this is so great! There’s a good Christian woman coming into my life.” To me, it was actually a little bit a hindrance, like, “Is this going to be a problem for us?” because I’m an atheist, she’s a Christian. And because she was willing to accept me how I was, I just accepted her how she was, and so it worked out. So when we got married, I was not a believer. I was not a person of faith. I was an atheist. She was a believing Christian. And that’s how we formed our marriage. I’m sure that there are those people listening who may have a spouse who doesn’t see life and belief in the same way. I’m curious, from their perspective… It sounds like your wife was very patient, not pushy, not pressing, gave you space to move along this journey on your own terms. Would you say that that was the case?  Yeah. I would say that’s beyond the case. She honestly never mentioned it to me. She just practiced her own faith and went about her own business quietly. And her faith, to be fair, was very quiet, and what I mean by that is she had grown up in the Catholic church. She had left the Catholic Church and a big part for her was she always felt called to a personal relationship with the Lord, and she felt that the way that the Catholic church, at least the way she experienced it was organized, was that there was an intermediary. There was the priest, and there was the parishioner, and then there was God on the other side. And in a real specific sort of metaphorical sense, she used to sneak into church after hours and go up behind the Holy of Holies so that she could be close to God. Her heart was seeking today, and she felt like… If she was wrong about all the structural stuff, she had a direct heart for God, and God had a direct heart for her, but she saw this structure between her and God, and she was willing to do something that was essentially cheating, right? That she would go into church when no one was there and go to kind of a secret place where she was not supposed to be, so that she could be closer to God. So when she left the Catholic church, she began a seeking of her own, which was just to have a heart for God and to have a personal relationship with God, and so that was very quiet. So her faith was very quiet and very steadfast, and it never impugned on me, and she never tried to impose it on me. And she just used to pray to God that I would come to faith. There’s a pivotal instance in her life before we got married. Her dad said he was very worried that she was going to marry me, and he loved me. We had a great relationship. But he said, “I’m worried because I’m worried that your husband’s going to burn in hell because he hasn’t accepted Jesus Christ,” and she said, “I don’t know what His plan is. I don’t know how it works, but I have absolute faith that that will not happen.” I mean, it turns out she was right. Thank God! She didn’t understand how she was going to be right. It’s not like she foretold the future, but she had enough faith in God, and I would add something super important. She was patient. She was willing to wait on God, something I struggle with quite often. She was incredibly patient over a lifetime of marriage before I came to the Lord. That’s really wonderful, and what a testimony to her and to her life. You had, as a militant atheist, such contempt for Christians and for Christianity. You viewed them in an extremely negative light. Obviously, those negative sensibilities or stereotypes of Christians and Christianity must have been broken down as you fall in love with someone who calls themself a Christian. It would be hard to hold those two views simultaneously. Did obviously living with her, loving her break down some of those negative understandings of what Christianity was and who Christians were?  I wish I could tell you I was that insightful. Again, a lot of this is embarrassing in hindsight, but I just viewed her separately from that. Okay.  I knew she was a wonderful person. I never made the connection. “Oh, part of that is her relationship with the Lord.” I just knew her as a wonderful person. In fact, over my lifetime—and this still happens today and I try not to be this person. The hypocrisy of so many Christians is what really set me off on a personal level. Doing business, I would meet Christians, and I would call them Sunday Christians. They went to church on Sunday, and I used to say they’d go to church on Sunday so they could pray for forgiveness so they could put the knife between your ribs on Monday and Tuesday, right? Wow.  And so I met a lot of folks that professed Christianity, that talked about going to church, that talked about their relationship with the Lord. I did business with them, and I watched them do horrible, terrible things, that I would think, “If you’re a follower of this faith and this is what you do as a follower, then I don’t want to be part of that faith.” And so of course I didn’t see that in my wife, but I never… sadly… now I know, but I never thought of her as like, “Oh, well, part of the reason that she’s such a great person is because of her faith in Jesus Christ and her following biblical tenets.” I just never thought about that. So you had this beautiful child born. There was something in you that became open at that moment or softened. Why don’t you walk us on farther from there?  So what started to happen is, the older I got, the more I realized that it could not just be me. Everything can’t be about me. When we’re babies, when we’re born, everything is about us. That’s the only thing we know, right? We scream to be fed. We scream to be changed. We scream to be picked up. We want what we want as we grow up, and maybe we have temper tantrums to give us what we want. The entire universe revolves around us, and hopefully, if we get wisdom as we grow, if we learn from our experiences, we learn that it’s not all about us. There’s other people. There are other needs. So after having Jacob be born and seeing that as some sort of miracle, I started to say, “There’s things I don’t understand. Maybe they’re not explainable by science, but maybe there’s something else. There has to be something else,” and so I started to think, “Well, maybe there’s just some sort of… like we’re all connected.” I think it’s called monism, right? We’re all one. Everything’s one. I started to think about that. In some way, there’s some universal force that connects all of us. So I started to seek. I didn’t seek Christianity. I sought everything but Christianity. I didn’t seek Judaism, either. Really what I started to seek is Eastern religion, Eastern thought, Buddhism, Hinduism. I have bookshelves full of books on Buddhism and Hinduism and going into more ancient religions, Jainism, which is the root of Hinduism. I literally went to India. I spent time in India. I was doing business in India, but I was fascinated by the way faith is integrated with everyday life in India. I don’t agree with most of the faith systems in India, but what I do agree with is, whatever you believe, if you’re a person of faith in India, it’s everything. It’s every day. You pray in the morning. You pray before you go into a meeting. There’s a shrine that’s prominent in your home, in the entry of your home. That’s true if your poor or rich. I remember coming from India thinking… Patty and I were relatively newly married. Thinking, “Man! That’s how I would want faith to be in my life! If I believed in God, I would want it to be like that! Not like the Sunday Christians. It’s everything! If there’s a God, then He’s everything, and it should be part of every fiber of my being.” So going to India taught me that. I studied yoga a lot. Patty and I got really into yoga as a form of exercise but sort of then philosophically, does that make any sense? I went very deep into Buddhism. I think as a philosophy, Buddhism’s a great thing. How to live your life in a great way. It was never meant to be a religion. I think Buddha himself, if you look back in the writings, he’d be horrified that they worship him and made it into some sort of a religion. It was supposed to be a comfortable, nice, happy way of living. So I studied all that stuff, and none of it resonated with me. It was interesting. I was fascinated by it. I appreciated the cultural impact it had had, the geopolitical impact that it had, but none of it made my heart sing. So I came out of all of that still seeking but not being fulfilled. So that’s an interesting turn of phrase. It didn’t make your heart sing. So there was still something there, obviously, that you were searching for. So what was your next step? If it wasn’t Eastern religion.  So I gave up. Essentially. I wasn’t looking anymore, but I’m always still intellectually curious. By happenstance, I started studying quantum physics. I know that sounds crazy, but I’m just a curious person. I love the science around quantum physics. I’m not a mathematician, so I don’t understand the mathematics, but I found it really fascinating that quantum physicists are seeking what they call “the god particle,” which is the origin of all things. Like can you go to the smallest particle and find the origin of everything? And from my thinking, I thought, “Well, that’s what faith is seeking. That’s what people who seek God, they’re seeking the origin of all things, so scientists and theologians are seeking the exact same thing. That’s weird.” And the more that I got into quantum physics, the more I realized quantum physics is actually as close as we’ve ever come from a proof perspective, starting to prove up God. For example, in quantum physics, they’ve now proven that a particle of light can be in two places at one time. The same particle. They can identify the particle. Now, that’s impossible according to anything we understand in science. What I just said should not be possible. They don’t know how it’s done. And when I saw that, I said, “God can do that.” Like, “If there’s a god, we know gods can be everywhere, all at once, and is, including through all of time. So is that God? What is that?” And so that started opening my mind, like science and religion not incompatible, completely integrated. And then I got into politics just by a bizarre happenstance. I built this huge political organization. 23 million members of conservative political activists. Through that process, I started to meet dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of righteous Christians all across America as I traveled. That’s really what opened my eyes and honestly gave me that spark and made my heart sing. So it was really a combination of things. Again, I love what you said about the compatibility of science and belief, because oftentimes there’s a sense of, “I believe in science, not God or religion.” And there seems to be a real I guess misunderstanding with regard to their absolute integration and being able to remain intellectually sober minded and intelligent and actually seeing how God grounds what we do in science. It’s a bit upside down. But it’s interesting that quantum physics paved the pathway for you towards the possibility of God!  A little crazy, I admit. But then you started meeting more… Like your wife, in a sense, more who were serious minded Christians from political activism. I guess they presented themselves as being more than Sunday Christians, and they were, I would presume, serious about their faith, serious about God and country.  Yes, absolutely. I’m also interested in the statement that your wife or the perspective that your wife had about you, that you seemed to be a Christian man but without… So you had the moral integrity and values, perhaps those ten commandments, those presumed ten commandments that you grew up with were instilled in some way. Somehow Judaism got into you even though you weren’t into Judaism. In some regard, that it held for you and your moral character, so that, when you met Christians and had a similar moral compass, I presume, that there seemed to be more in common than you thought. Was it surprising to you?  You know, well first of all, I’ll credit to my parents, because that moral code was put into me by my parents very intensely, and when I started to travel… I have always loved people. I just deeply love people, and I always have, from the time I was little, I’m just a people person, and so when I meet people, like if you asked me, “What do you collect?” You could look around on my shelves or whatever. I don’t have collections, but I do collect relationships because I just love people. When I meet somebody I love, I just stay in touch. I’ll stay in touch for a lifetime. I’m the person who will call you after two years and say, “Hey, we haven’t talked in a while.” Because I remember that spark in your eyes that meant something to me. And so, when I started traveling around, and I would sit with somebody and I would think, “Man, there’s something about this person.” I would always ask. And I would say, “You know, you seem well settled. Things are crazy right now. You don’t seem angry. You seem happy. What is that?” And I started to hear over and over, “Well, I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t like this before I was saved,” or, “It’s my relationship with Jesus Christ,” or, “It’s not me. It’s my Lord and Savior.” And I started to hear this over and over and over from people. If you travel in conservative political circles, you’re going to meet a lot of Christians. That’s just the way it is. And so this is who I was crossing paths with. And Patty will tell you that, while this was going on, people would come up to me all the time because I’m becoming a public figure. I’m going from being a private person to a public figure. And people would come up to me all the time and say, “I’m praying for you,” and I’ll tell you, if somebody had said that to me in college, I’d have probably said something offensive in return, to be honest with you. I wouldn’t have liked it. I’d have been offended by it. I’d have probably told ’em to bug off and said something nasty. And I started to just feel like, “Wow, that’s really nice,” like, “I appreciate that.” It didn’t have the meaning to me that it does today. It almost makes me cry with people say that to me. Back then, it was just kind of like, “That’s very nice.” It’s like somebody saying, “Hey, we care about you.” And so all these people were saying this to me, and Patty would talk to them, and they’d say, “Hey, we’re praying for your husband.” She would say, “Hey, I appreciate that,” and they would say, “It seems like he’s already a Christian,” like, “We see the Lord working in him.” And she would say, “I’ve seen that since before I married him. He’s the most Christian man I know. He just doesn’t know it yet, and I believe the Lord’s working in him.” So a lot of people said this to her. I had beyond what one human being deserves. I can’t possibly deserve this. I had thousands of people praying for me all over the country who I would meet, many of them who I now know were. And they’re a big part of my path to salvation. I met a family in Sacramento, they would stay after every event. Four home schooled girls, mom, and dad, and every event, they could come pray for me and with me after the event. And they knew I was an atheist. And they would just keep praying for me. They were patient and persistent and loving. And I love those guys. And they’re still good friends of mine. The girls are grown up now. They’re wonderful kids. Some of them are married and have families of their own. They prayed me through. They prayed me to the Lord. Then I met Dr. Dobson. Most of your listeners will know who James Dobson is. I had a chance to go to a big dinner, a fancy political dinner. All these big round tables, and I was seated at a table with Dobson. And I remember watching Dobson and thinking, “How come he’s like that?” All these people are talking about all the things that they’ve done, and “When I met this person…” and, “When I worked for this President…” and, “When I did this incredible thing…” and all Dobson was doing was like, “That’s fascinating. How did you get to be there? How did you meet him? How did that make you feel?” And I thought, “This guy has ministered to millions of people! He’s ministered to Presidents and foreign dignitaries. He’s been on television. He doesn’t care about himself. All he wants to do is love on all of these people,” and I remember sitting at that table thinking, “Whatever that thing is, I want that. I want to be like that. I don’t want to be like them,” and so that had a profound impact on me. He had no idea of the impact, what he put in my heart that night by being Christian, not by being famous, not by being powerful, but by walking like Christ, by acting the way that Christ asks us to act, he transformed my heart. Something opened up in my heart that night that made me seek whatever it was that he had. So that was a big turning point in my life. That’s fascinating. We often don’t know who’s watching. And I’ve heard it said, “The city on a hill works both ways.” We can cause people to leave Christianity and the faith because of not taking it seriously or that hypocrisy that you mentioned earlier, but then there are those people like James Dobson or the people who took time to come and pray with you, that get your attention, that you can see that there’s something different. They live differently. They’re selfless, not like the child who’s just coming up. Like you said, everything is about them. The world revolves around them. And these people obviously had others in mind first.  Yeah, absolutely. Then I met… This is the biggest break point of my life is I met a guy by the name of Tim Dunn, who has become one of my closest friends in life, a political mentor and a mentor in every way, and I largely credit him for being the guy that brought me across the finish line and accepting Christ, not by asking me to but by just teaching me, and the first thing Tim did—he’s a wealthy donor. He’s on my board of directors. And we just hit it off intellectually. We could talk quantum physics and theology and religion and sociology and geology, and we just were both interested in everything, and we’d be up late at night, talking on the phone, like new best friends. And one night he asked me what I know about my own heritage. And I said, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Well, you’re Jewish. That’s a totally fascinating, amazing thing! Your people are the Chosen People. I mean you go all the way back to a covenant with the Lord. I know you don’t believe in that stuff, but it’s incredible, the stories that have been told about your people for over 2,000 years, and what do you know about that?” And I said, “Nothing.” He’s like, “You should know about that! It’s really cool!” Like, “Whether you believe or not, it doesn’t matter. The history is there,” and so he said, “Why don’t you read Hebrews?” And he had me read Hebrews, and that was honestly my first real introduction to scripture. And we started studying together. And he never said to me—and I think this is so important. He never said, “By the way, Mark. What I’m doing here is you need to be saved, because I’m worried about your soul and you’re going to burn in hell.” If he had done that, I’d have just been like, “I’m done. I’m out. I’ve heard this stuff before. Not interested in this stuff. You’re judging me. I don’t want that.” But all he did was use my intellect, and like, “These are things that should fascinate you,” and the real crux point with Tim is he asked me one day, “When did Christianity and Judaism actually separate? They’re obviously two major world religions, both Abrahamic in origin, so how’s the separation happen?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know much about it, but Jesus is born, He lives, He’s crucified. If you’re a believer, He’s resurrected, and He ascends, and those who believe that that happened are Christians, and those who don’t, if they were Jewish before, they’re still Jewish. Those who now believe He’s the resurrected Messiah, those are Christians.” And he said, “No, that’s wrong.” And I said, “Okay, so what’s the story?” And he said, “I’m not going to tell you. Go figure it out. But your history’s horrible. You need a history lesson.” And I love this kind of mentoring. I practice this now. “No, that’s wrong. Go figure it out,” right? So I did. And for me, as a Jew, and I recommend this to anybody who is speaking to Jews about Christ, what that meant to me is like this door swung open, and I thought, “Wait! Are you saying that I can be a Jew and be a Christian?” And Tim laughed. He’s got this southern drawl. He’s like, “I’m not just saying it. I’m saying that’s how it’s s’posed to be!” He’s like, “That’s just the deal. This is what God was all about was God made a promise to the Jewish people that He would send a Messiah, and He did, and this is just the answer to that promise.” He said, “You couldn’t any more not be a Jew than I couldn’t any more be a 6 foot 3 guy,” like, “I just am what I am. You are what you are. And we just have to deal with that.” And that was fascinating and profound to me because Jews believe, even if we’re not told this, that it would be a betrayal to our Jewish heritage to become a Christian. And it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s actually a fulfillment of our heritage. And so for me that’s what made me say, “Okay, now I’ve got to really look at this. Because I’m not betraying anything. I’m fulfilling something. That’s how it was supposed to be. That’s how it was in the Bible. That’s how it was after Christ came and walked the earth. So I’ve got to take a serious look.” That’s when I started studying Paul. Paul says, when he’s in Rome, waiting to visit Caesar, under house arrest, the Jews come to him, accuse him of not being Jewish, and he says, “What! I’m a Hebrew among Hebrews. I keep the Jewish law!” And they don’t believe him. They challenge him. “Oh, well, come to the Temple and pay for our ceremonies.” He’s like, “Yeah, whatever. No problem. I’m still Jewish. What’s wrong with you guys? Don’t you understand this has nothing to do with whether I’m Jewish or not? The promise has been fulfilled. The Lord has walked the earth, and that’s all I’m saying.” “The good news has arrived. The law has been fulfilled. You don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore.” And so, for me, I mean, you can see my excitement. That’s when it sang in my heart. That’s when I heard the song. That’s when I was like, “This is okay. I can do this,” and then sort of the anticlimax is there’s no moment. I never had a moment where I thought, “Okay! Lord, I give my life. This is it! I can see You. I can hear You!” It was just one day I just thought, “I can’t not believe. It doesn’t make any sense not to. And now what I’m believing is so obviously untrue. Why do I believe that anymore?” And I just said, “Oh, I guess I’m a believer.” And then I said, “Okay, Lord. I’m a sinner. I don’t know if You’ll have me. I hope You’ll have me. I’ve sinned gravely against You for a very long time, but I give my life and my soul over to You, and I ask You to cleanse me of my sins. I’m Yours. I’m all Yours if You’ll have me.” But it was not dramatic. I was not on a beach. I was not on a mountaintop. It was just kind of this logical, “I guess I’m there. I guess this is what I believe now.” Yeah. I’ve heard it said that believing in Jesus is one of the most Jewish things that you can do, because He is the Jewish, the foretold Jewish Messiah, so you’re accepting the fullness of your Judaism. You’re not changing paths in a sense, like cutting off one. It’s like fulfilling everything that… all the feasts, all the laws, everything is fulfilled in Christ, and to see it from the fullness of that perspective, I can’t imagine how that must feel when really all of the pieces came together for you, how wonderful that must have been. You came to a place where you believed in Jesus as your Savior, and I’m sure Patty was thrilled. So how has your life changed since you came to that moment of belief and confession? And how long ago was that?  So I’m 59 years old. That happened when I was 51. So it’s 8 years ago. And it’s completely transformed my life, in many ways. The first is I would just say, on a personal level, aside from the religious or the faith aspect of it, I’m a very driven A-type of a person. Whatever I do, I’m going to do it to the max. I’m going to accomplish the most. That’s just the way I work. There’s an incredible amount of pressure in that, right? Everything’s on you. It’s all on my shoulders. I have to make everything happen. If it doesn’t happen, it’s my fault, and there’s all this self blame, and so to realize that I was saved and that there was something much greater than me and that I had a Lord and Savior and that I really wasn’t in control of anything except for whether I choose to accept my Lord and Savior and that there’s a greater plan and that everything together for the good and it’s not all on me. It’s impossible to describe the measure of relief. Now I still struggle with that because I put myself in the driver’s seat when I shouldn’t. That’s how I’m wired, and I work in that. That’s me fighting against my flesh, but it’s impossible to describe the level of relief. So I went from being a very kind of wound person, wound up tight, to being pretty relaxed all the time. It’s pretty easy for me to say, “Yes, that frustrates me, but God’s got that. I don’t know. That’s not big for God. It may seem big to me, but that’s not big for God, and God’s got that, and I’ve turned it over to God, so it’s all okay,” and interestingly, it’s allowed me, I think, to accomplish far more than I could’ve ever accomplished. Because when I realized it’s not up to me and I can only do what I can do, my job is to fight the fight and run the race and leave the results up to God. It allows you to do so much more. The stress, the anguish, the anxiety, the performance pressure don’t get in your way anymore. Because it’s not on me. He’s got it. I don’t have to worry about it. So it transformed me in that way. It transformed a lot of my relationships. I said I’ve always loved people, but I also have the part of me… I’m verbally strong. I’ve always been this way. I’m an opinionated person. I’m trained as a lawyer. I used to take great joy in eviscerating people in verbal combat. It felt really good to me. I would always feel afterwards terrible. In the dark of night, like myself, like, “That was pretty mean. I made that person feel really bad,” but in the moment, as a lawyer, you’re really trained to do that. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t enjoy that anymore. I don’t like that anymore. So it transformed me in that way. It explained to me why I love people so much. My friend Tim said to me one time, after I became a Christian, he goes, “You know why you love people so much?” and I said, “No.” And he said, “Because you always looked in their eyes and you always saw God,” like, “Before you even knew God was there, before you even believed in God, that’s how you were connecting. Each one of those people made in the image of God. You got that in your heart before you got that in your head. That’s why you love people.” So now I recognize that on an outward basis, and I openly seek that a lot more. And I would say the big one for me was that I wear my faith on my sleeve boldly. I’m proud, and not only am I not ashamed, the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life is completely surrender to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. There’s nothing bigger that I’ve ever accomplished in my life. There can’t be anything bigger. There never will be anything bigger. And I’m happy to tell people about that. So I say that from the stage, I say it in environments where people would normally say, “Well, you shouldn’t say that. This is a very political place,” or, “There are people who don’t believe what you believe.” I don’t care. I am boldly and brashly in love with God. I describe my love for God as like what you feel like when you fall in love the first time. It’s just so overwhelming, and everybody needs to know how awesome this person is! And I have to tell you. It’s not that I want to, it’s that I can’t contain myself. That’s how I feel about my relationship with the Lord. I can’t contain myself. Wow! You are like Paul in so many ways, so many ways. That’s extraordinary! And coming to faith at 51. I imagine there were so many people, since you’re so well connected relationally, who were just stunned, having known you as the militant atheist that you were.  Yeah. There were people who were mad at me and who really struggled with it. I have one brother, my younger brother. He was furious when it happened, and we were actually at a birthday party for my dad. I guess it would’ve been his 70th birthday party, something like that, 75th birthday party, and I remember him just cornering me and just going after me. Like, “I can’t believe you would do this!” and, “It’s just because of the people you’re hanging out with and just bad influences on you,” and, “You’re suspending rational judgment,” and he’s since come around, and we have a great relationship. I think he thought I was going to become something weird, you know? He had the perception I had, like all of a sudden I was going to demand that he be Christian, like I’m going to tell him he’s going to burn in hell, and I’m going to lecture him and judge him. My dad was really offended. My dad was offended not because I became a Christian but because I didn’t consult him. Like why didn’t I ask him? He’d been my mentor my whole life. And I had to explain to Dad, “Hey, you’re my mentor. I admire you. I love you. I knew your position on this. I know you don’t believe in Jesus as your Savior. I know you don’t believe in God even generically, so I knew your position very thoroughly. I grew up with it. Why would I consult you if I’m seeking something broader and more?” And we have a fantastic relationship. We’re very close, both my parents, and we have a tight family. And so it hasn’t hurt any relationships in the long term, but in the short term, I think you described it correctly. It really threw some people off balance because it’s just not something they saw in me, becoming a Christian. So when you were growing up and considering religion, you saw it in purely sociological terms. Your brother kind of brought that out, that he thought that maybe it’s just the people you are hanging around with. How would you, as a Christian on this side of things, answer that question? How did you answer your brother? Is it more than just belonging or sociological? Obviously, this has transformed your life, but as an intellectual person and people were pushing back, thinking they’re smarter, like you were, how would you respond to someone who pushes back to you on that?  You know, I’m very understanding and very loving because, how could I not be. It would be the height of hypocrisy not for me to be loving and understanding of their circumstances, since for the vast majority of my adult life I believed what they believed, either agnostically or atheistically. So when I hear people are super critical of people like that, I don’t feel that way. I don’t understand that way. For me, the emotion that I feel, honestly, is sadness. It breaks my heart because… I have a friend that I’m talking to and mentoring right now. He’s Jewish, and I think he’s coming to the Lord. He’s definitely moving that way. He’s going to church. He feels an affinity. And he asked me, “Why is this so important to you?” and my response was, “I love you, and there’s no greater gift that I could give you as somebody that I love than the gift of knowing Jesus Christ, the salvation, the peace that comes from that, the strength that comes from that. There’s no worldly gift that even measures that can compare. There’s nothing on the same shelf. And so that’s what I want for you.” And so when I’m talking to people who push back, that’s what I would say is, “Look, I have no judgment for you for not believing this. I didn’t believe this most of my life, so it would be foolish and hypocritical for me to judge you, but I do believe that I’ve learned something that you have not yet learned, and it would be selfish of me not to tell you that.” Like, “Why would I keep this most incredible gift I’ve ever received in my life? If I said, ‘I’m just going to keep that from you,’ that’s selfish. And am I going to keep it from you because I’m embarrassed what you might think of me? That’s selfish. Because you might judge me? Well, that’s selfish. So the only reason I would not tell you about this is because I’m selfish. If I’m embarrassed to tell you, I’m selfish. I’m worried how you’ll judge me. So I’m going to talk to you about it. And if you don’t want to hear about it, I’m fine with that, too. I still love you. I love you exactly the same as if you wanted to hear about it. For those who don’t know what the gospel is, could you just briefly describe what this gift is?  Yeah. I mean, for me, the way I define the gospel or the gift is the good news that it’s not about you. You don’t have to fight. You don’t have to be at war. You have somebody that already died for you and went through this for you. It’s an incredible thing to think about… I’m not sure. A lot of the Christians that I know that have been Christians their whole lives, in some ways I feel like they don’t understand the enormity of it because they didn’t disbelieve. When you disbelieve your whole life and then you learn the good news that Somebody actually was willing to go to the cross for you, to take your sin, to take everything you’ve ever done wrong in your life and everything you ever will do wrong in your life, and to suffer the most horrible imaginable death to cleanse you of your sin, so you don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore. You don’t have to stress out about that stuff any more. To me, that’s the greatest news that has ever been delivered to humanity. And that’s what the gospel is about, and so, to me, I just want people to know about that. And I don’t care. You can think I’m foolish. You can think I believe a fairy tale. You can think whatever you want to think about it. I’m not embarrassed by that. I thought the same stuff! So it’s all fine, and thank God that when I thought that stuff, that there were people who didn’t care that I thought that stuff, who didn’t judge me for thinking that stuff, who loved me, who prayed for me. So if there is someone, Mark, who is listening and maybe they’re on that edge of being open, what would you say to the curious skeptic who maybe listening in to you, to your story?  Yeah. I would say the main thing, the first thing is just to open your heart. I’m not telling you to believe. I don’t think anybody can tell you to believe. I’m telling you to open your heart, to look around the world and acknowledge there are things that you just don’t understand, that don’t make sense, the universe, life, whatever it is that you look out, and you go, “That just seems impossible to me,” and yet it happens, to understand that there are things that are impossible that happen, things that you and I don’t understand, and be curious and be open to looking. For me, as a person who’s a very logical person, reading apologetics mattered a lot to me, so I would recommend the best book that I read, the simplest, the easiest to read, the most convincing was Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ. Millions of people have read this book. If you’re a skeptic, you should read this book. Strobel was the ultimate skeptic, a lawyer, an investigative journalist. He went through it. I looked through this. I looked at the crucifixion. I looked at the resurrection. I looked at the historical evidence, what we call historicity of the Bible. And Strobel walks you through this in a way where he was telling a story of a person who moves from atheism to belief, and so I think that’s really important. There’s another book that I love called Letters from a Skeptic, which is letters between a son who is actually a minister, he’s gone through seminary, and a father who is a skeptic and who expresses everything that I expressed as a skeptic, everything. There’s difficult questions that you have to grapple with. If God is good and just, then why is there suffering and evil on the earth. These are important questions that, as a skeptic, you should grapple with, but I would argue you should grapple with them. Just dismissing them and saying, “That means there’s no God,” that’s shallow and superficial. And this is the most important question you’ll ever look at. Is there a God? What’s my purpose? Am I created? Why am I here? Why are we here? So I would say, if those are the most important questions we can ask ourselves, and I believe fundamentally they are, then you as a thinking person have an obligation to answer those questions, and you do that by doing the reading, doing the research, talking to other people, and I would ultimately say praying for guidance. That’s excellent advice. It strikes me that your life is very similar to Lee Strobel’s too, isn’t it? He was an attorney- Absolutely. … who had a believing wife, and he went to disprove it, right? So, through his journeying, found what he…. He’s a huge proponent, right? Of Christianity now. Now you’ve spoken a lot about how we as Christians can—and given beautiful examples, through Tim and through Patty and those… Dr. Dobson and so many who touched you in a way that caused you to rethink your position. How would you encourage us as Christians to live or to speak or to engage in those who are skeptical about our faith?  Yeah. The biggest answer that I can give that’s the best, I think, is love. I mean I don’t know what else to say. Love people who are not lovable. Love people who are hard. Love people who are mean. Love people who are difficult in your life. When we read the Bible, one of the things that struck me, and I had somebody point this out to me, is the Bible does not tell us to go out and tell people to be Christians. I think there’s one spot in the Bible where it says to go out in profess in that way. What the Bible tells us is to go out and live out our faith, to walk the walk, to be Christians. Because when you do that, people will ask you, just like I looked at Dr. Dobson and that, “What is that? I don’t understand that. I want that.” People will do that. Her daughter suffered from stage 4 cancer multiple times. She’s a beautiful young woman, a mother of now teenage girls, and last time, she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer… Jenny’s a close friend of mine. I’ve watched her go through it. She’s a woman of deep faith. And I watched her go through it, and I thought, “Could I be like her? I don’t know that I could.” This was before I came to faith. She understood. She said, “Look, Mark, this is God’s path. It doesn’t make me happy, but I’m at peace that He is in charge, and I can live with that. I’ll pray more. I’ll hang out with the Lord more. But God has a plan. It’s just not always my plan.” And I remember looking at that and thinking, “She’s living it,” right? So it’s not just that she says, “I’m a Christian. I go to church. You should do these things.” I watched her, and I thought, “Man, if that kind of thing ever happened in my life, I would want the peace that she has. So you said, “You never know when people are just watching.” You’re not saying, they’re just watching, so live the life that Christ sets forth for us to the extent we can. Of course, none of us live it perfectly, but live it as close as you can. Strive to live that. That’s what will draw other people to the heart of Jesus Christ. That’s beautiful. Mark, you have been—like you say, you have a gift verbally of being able to express yourself and to communicate well, and you have told your story, your full character arc, moving from militant atheism to just a passionate follower of Christ in such a compelling way, with wisdom. I think that somehow what you saw in Patty, you have a piece in you, too, now, that the Lord lives in you, and it’s obvious. I’m so inspired and challenged in a good way, especially with your boldness in your faith. Thank you so much for coming on the Side B Podcast to tell your story, Mark. I know that so many people are going to be just as inspired as I’ve been.  Well, thank you for having me. Any time I get to talk about the Lord, it’s a privilege. Wonderful.  Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Mark’s story today. You can find out more about him and some of his recommended resources in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, please reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, that you’ll share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how another skeptic flips the record of their life.   

A brilliant thinker, Dr. Peter Harris lost his childhood faith in God at university when intellectually challenged.  After years of atheism, the problem of meaninglessness caused him to reconsider the reality and credibility of the belief he once left behind.   Podcast episode notes:   Peter’s recommended books: For ‘The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong’: https://wipfandstock.com/9781532651977/the-rage-against-the-light/ For ‘Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith’: https://wipfandstock.com/9781725256163/do-you-believe-it/ Peter’s recent articles in defense of the Christian faith at apologetics.com: https://apologetics.com/blog/peterharris/an-unexpcted-ally/ https://apologetics.com/blog/peterharris/why-christianity-not-epicureanism-is-the-philosophy-we-need-now/ https://apologetics.com/blog/peterharris/who-wants-to-live-forever-christians-should/ Webpage on his church’s website: https://www.staidangravesend.org.uk/faith-and-spirituality/faith-and-spirituality-6541.php Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has one been an atheist but who unexpectedly became a Christian. There are those who have never had any belief in God and embraced atheism from their youth, and there are those who once believed in God and then changed their mind, becoming an atheist.  It’s not uncommon to hear from skeptics that belief in God is nothing but blind faith, that there is no evidence for God’s existence, but sometimes that’s also the way religious people talk and believe as well. When difficult questions arise, we’re sometimes told to, “Just believe,” or, “Just have faith,” in the midst of our doubts. By these statements, we are led to presume that there isn’t much more than our willed faith, that there is no evidence to support our beliefs or perhaps we shouldn’t even try to have a reasoned faith. For someone who is a thinker, an intellectual, who wants solid reasons to support his or her beliefs, this approach doesn’t work very well. It may, in fact, cause many to leave their faith behind, along with with other perceived childhood fairy tales.  In today’s episode, Dr. Peter Harris lost his childhood Christian faith when confronted with intellectual challenge at university. He was hard pressed to find any substantive answers for his questions, other than to just have faith in faith. The seeming lack of evidence for Christianity did not satisfy his brilliant mind, and so he left it behind to become an atheist. What was it that drew him back to Christianity to now become one of its strongest intellectual defenders? I hope you’ll come along to find out.  Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Peter. It’s so great to have you!  Thank you very much for inviting me on. Thank you. As we’re getting started, Peter, why don’t you tell us a bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps your education?  Okay. I live in Gravesend, which is in the southeast corner of England. At the tender age of 18, I went to University of Cambridge to study history. I’ve since acquired two master’s degrees and two doctorates, one of which concerns the anti-theism of Christopher Hitchens, and the other was a study of the military service tribunals of the first world war, which essentially were committees set up to decide whether men who wished not to fight in the war could actually be allowed not to fight and perhaps do something else or have nothing to do with the war at all. And that took about 6-1/2 years to do, that one, whereas the other one, on Hitchens, took me about 3 years, because I’d already read and listened and watched so much of what Hitchens had put out on the internet and in his books about his anti-theism. I’m married to Hasina, and we have two children. I work for Lucent University in Texas. I have created their online History of Christianity course, and I also work as a high school teacher as well. So yes, I’m very busy, but what I do, I really enjoy. It sounds really quite fascinating. It also speaks to your depth of intellect and thought. You obviously like to think deeply about certain issues. You are driven by ideas, it sounds like. Very interested in issues of theology and history and I guess truth, I would imagine. I understand you study apologetics and those kinds of things as well. So I’m terribly intrigued by the story that you’re going to tell us today because you are really quite an extraordinary person in terms of just liking to think about ideas and issues and history, especially Christianity in the context of history. I think that would come into play when we hear more about your story. Because I know you didn’t begin on this side of understanding Christianity and its history and understanding and teasing out Christopher Hitchens’ anti-theism, that perhaps you were on more of his perspective, maybe not… It sounds like you share brilliance. Let’s just say that. You share brilliance, perhaps, but you perhaps also shared a bit of his atheistic worldview from the beginning, or somewhere along the line, and as someone who’s intrigued by your story, why don’t we start back at the beginning? Tell me… Obviously, you are from England. Did you grow up in England? Is that your home?  Yes. I did. I’ve lived in England all my life. I have traveled fairly regularly abroad because my wife is French, and my children hold dual citizenship. They’re both French and British. And yes, I’ve essentially lived for 52 years in England. Well, this is my 52nd. I’m not yet 52; 51, so that sounds a bit better, doesn’t it? And yes. I mean I suppose in many ways I’m not only interested within my own culture but also in other cultures as well, and in particular, I’m very interested in the United States also, its American Christianity and its history that perhaps most intrigues me. So yes, I suppose I do have a very British outlook, but I think I’m very cosmopolitan as well and very interested in other nations, cultures, and histories and how Christianity has played a role in shaping, forming nations and what they are today in their culture, their laws, their attitudes, and I suppose even their foreign policies. You do have a very broadened perspective, it sounds like, very intentionally so. So back when you were growing up in England, what was that culture like? Was it a Christian-centered culture? Was your family religious at all? Why don’t you take me back to your roots?  Yes. I think I would probably go back to the early 1980s, when I was about 11 or 12. Because I was in a church choir. I sang for a local Anglican parish church, and I don’t come from a Christian background. My parents never went to church. They never spoke much about faith or religion. My grandparents, I don’t think, had any sort of regular church observance. So I came from a very sort of secular, not de-Christianized context, but I suppose an indifferent context. People just didn’t worry about church. They didn’t seem to think much about God. They weren’t particularly hostile, either. In fact, they weren’t hostile at all. They were just indifferent to that side of life. And I would say that maybe Britain in the 1980s was more overtly Christian than it is now, but the slide away from Christianity really began in the 1890s, actually. There’s evidence of church ministers, at the end of the 19th century, complaining that they were losing congregants at quite a fast rate, and that decline has continued, and it really got going after the first world war, which I can only imagine is a consequence of people not being able to imagine God exists after having seen so much suffering in hospitals and on battlefields. So there has been a steady, relentless drop away from church attendance in Britain. But we are still a very spiritual nation, because generally, when governments do censuses, they find that perhaps around about 70% of British people have a belief in the transcendent, the metaphysical, or some kind of God. And that figure has been fairly consistent over, I think probably the last 20 or 30 years, but it doesn’t translate into church observance, so probably maybe 3% to 5% in the British population is in church on a Sunday morning, but 70% will say they believe in God. So that’s the sort of context in which I grew up. But the wonderful thing about my childhood is that my parents made some very good choices as to which school to send me as a child, and they sent me to a grammar school, and I had to pass an exam to get into this grammar school. And it was a school that had a Christian headmaster, or principal, and there were lots of Christian teachers. Now it was not a Christian school. It was a public school, a state school, but I became a Christian because I went to that school. That school had a Christian Union. There were many Christian members of staff. There was one particular member of staff who organized this Christian Union so that we would have prayer meetings before the day began. Students would gather to pray on a Thursday evening after school. And I became a Christian whilst I was participating in a school production of a musical called Fiddler on the Roof, and as I’m sure everyone’s aware, in that musical there are Russian Jews living in the early 20th century who are awaiting the Messiah. And I like to think that I actually found the Messiah during that time. And the reason why is that I heard the gospel being explained by members of the school cast who were also Christians. And I was the easiest convert. I heard once, and I believed immediately. And I took one of the gospel tracts from one of these students who had told my group of friends the gospel. I took it home. My parents did not like me reading late at night. They wanted me to go to sleep. So I would use a torch, and I would hide under the blankets or the covers, and read, and I read that tract by torchlight. I said the prayer at the end and became a Christian. And I felt tremendous love and peace, and I wasn’t expecting that. No one told me that that would happen And I concluded that that was God. That I had been reconciled with God. But my loss of faith occurred when I was 19. And when I look back on that time of my life, I had drawn some very serious lessons, and when I think back to that time in my life, to some extent, that shapes what I do now as an apologist. Because I lost my faith at university, and I think it’s tragic because I’m aware of some of the statistics regarding how many young people go to university or college as Christians and come out as atheists and agnostics. And they’re not prepared to be able to answer some of the really difficult questions that will come their way. I’m aware of a Christian apologist who’s also a biologist, and he said on the very first day of one of his lecture series, the lecturer who was teaching evolutional science said to the class, “Stand up if you are a Christian,” and he stood up. There were a few other people who stood up. And he said, “Well, by the end of this course, you won’t be, I can assure you,” which is appalling discrimination. If you had a Christian lecturer who did it the other way around, Twitter would be in uproar. So I’m very, very concerned about that particular age group. So it sounds like as a child you came to believe quite readily and you experienced what you thought was the Christian life and you felt the love and peace of God, and that, I guess, was a very settled thing for you. Were you active in your faith during your teen years? I’m just curious. And were you taught more or discipled in any way intellectually before you got to college, how to think in more worldview or grander terms than the simple gospel?  Yeah. That’s a brilliant question because it really helps me to elucidate my own experience. I left my Anglican church when my voice broke because I didn’t want to sing the harmony section. I quite liked singing the melody, which is what the treble, the sopranos do. Right.  So my voice broke just short of my 13th birthday. I had gone through that sort of croaking frog stage that many boys do as their voices break and then finally the adult voice emerges. My church essentially was my Christian Union at school for about four years. That’s where I got my fellowship. That’s where I got my teaching from. That’s what gave me the opportunity to pray and to worship God. Because I was a little bit scared about going to church by myself, because I knew that no one else in my family would go. But when I got to the age of 16, I decided that I wanted to go to church, and I remember, in January of 1986, going to a local Pentecostal church, which was about two minutes’ walk from my house, and I fell in love with that kind of worship, although I’m not into Pentecostalism any more. I’m an Anglican again. But I have very fond memories of that church because the worship was very warm. It was very authentic. People always seemed pleased to see me, which is really important for a teenager. And I remember enjoying the preaching. I liked the people. The people were very, very welcoming. And that continued for two years, until I was 18, and then I went to university. But your question, was I discipled? I would say no. People showed interest in me, but there was no one individual who spent regular time with me, which again I think is really important. And secondly, I certainly had no knowledge or understanding of how to defend the gospel against intellectual attack. For me, C.S. Lewis was a writer of children’s stories. He was not the author of Mere Christianity or The Abolition of Man or The Problem of Pain or whatever. He was not an apologist. He was a writer of children’s stories. And that’s great. I think everything he wrote is amazing, but it is hard to formulate an argument on the basis of fiction, although sometimes you can. I mean I know philosophers do write fiction to explain their ideas, like the existentialists, but I had no training. So when I went to university, I was very lucky for the first year because I had two very good friends who were Christians. They were in their final year. They were two years older than me, and they really took me under their wing, and I ended up going to a Presbyterian church, so whilst I was at college, I was going to a Presbyterian church and dressing up smartly, taking a Bible, and going and enjoying hour and a half long sermons, which… I mean, I love long sermons, and so I loved my Presbyterian church, but in vacation, I would come back to my Pentecostal church, where it was just very different, and I suppose I drew a lot from both those Christian traditions. It was a true Reformed Presbyterian church. It was not a liberal Presbyterian church. And there was very faithful preaching of the gospel, very faithful preaching of the word generally, but again I did not have any sort of education regarding the defense of the gospel against skeptics. And that’s what basically undermined things for me. In my second year, I made friends with an individual who was a real anti-theist. He had no time at all for Christianity. He had no time at all for any religion, and because he was studying philosophy, he knew all the arguments against religion, and so he would present to me David Hume’s skepticism regarding the teleological argument or the cosmological argument. He would present to me Hume’s argument against miracles. And I’d never heard any of this in my life. And I was defenseless in the face of what he was saying. But I do remember being tormented by this question of whether my faith was true. And I would say that there were intellectual and emotional forces working at the same time, in the sense that I had this desire to be an academic, an intellectual, and I had come to the conclusion that, to be one of those, I could not be a Christian. Because everybody I knew who was teaching was not a Christian or never spoke about any kind of faith. A lot of the very bright undergraduates with whom I was studying had no faith, either. They found it ridiculous to be a Christian. And I remember one evening, it was a Sunday evening, and I get the impression from my memory that it was maybe a Sunday evening in November. I don’t know… You probably know a lot about the British climate because you studied in Britain, but Britain seems to specialize in really gloomy, dark, wet, cold November evenings, so that’s why I think it’s November. Yes.  And I decided I was going to answer this question once and for all, and I decided to call upon an acquaintance of mine who struck me as the most spiritual person I knew, and he emanated peace and love and gentleness and all that sort of thing. He seemed to me to be a living saint. And I thought, “If anybody knows the answer, he does,” and I remember calling on his lodging, as he was renting a room outside of college. So was I. So I was on my way home from studying in the library all day. It was a Sunday evening. I went and knocked on his door, and he opened his door, and he looked rather perturbed at seeing me because I had gotten the impression that he was going to have an early night because he had a week of lectures and seminars and experiments to do. He was studying natural science. Yet he was a gentleman. He invited me in. He made me a cup of tea. And I remember, in the course of the conversation, saying to him, “Can you give me a reason why I should be a Christian?” And I believed that he could give me the answer. And I remember he looked rather startled because the conversation now had become very serious, and he sat there and he thought for a few moments, and he said to me, “Peter, it’s faith. You just have to believe it.” And that was the last answer I wanted. Right.  If there was an answer I didn’t want, it was that one! Yes! Yes.  So I remember leaving. No, actually. I remember saying to him, and I’m pretty sure I must’ve said it very robotically because I didn’t mean a word of what I was saying. I said to him, “Thank you for your answer. You have put my mind at rest.” Actually, the complete opposite was the case, and when I left his lodgings and cycled home, I decided, “Yes, I am now an atheist. If that’s the best Christianity can do, I’m not a Christian anymore.” And my faith sort of flickered on and flickered off over the next four years, but by the age of 23, I was a pretty hardened atheist. I mean I probably would’ve defined myself as an agnostic, but I behaved like an atheist. I didn’t pray. I didn’t read the Bible just in case God was there. I didn’t investigate any other religions, either. But I do remember being very hardened in my skepticism. And at times being quite aggressive in my response to Christians, which I don’t like to think about now. I remember when I was in my hometown of Chatham, there was a man with a megaphone preaching the gospel outside a McDonald’s restaurant where loads of people were. And he was a member of the Salvation Army, and I remember shouting out at him, “Why don’t you shut up?” Oh, my! Okay.  So it got that bad. So here I was, very easily saved at the age of 12, and here I am now being rude to a street preacher, and he ignored me, of course. I walked on. But that was my attitude at that time. Yeah. I can see how that would happen, but disappointing to lose that one thing you had that gave you peace. But you were doing it in an honest way, though. I would imagine, as someone who was an intellectual, who wanted to pursue life as an intellectual, that you had to be honest with your beliefs, and there was no other option for you. If at that time you felt that belief was blind, that it was just a matter of faith, almost in faith. That that wasn’t sufficient. I guess, especially, too… I mean all of those to whom you looked up in academia were all nonbelievers. So I can see why you would move that direction, but I imagine you felt a loss. At least at the beginning. Because, like you say, it kind of flickered on and off. So I presumed you kind of just moved into that understanding and more sobered understanding. “This is the way life is.” Again, as an intellectual, that’s how you pursued your reality and pursued your education and whatnot.  Yes. I’m curious, at this point within your atheism, did it change the way you lived your life? Were you intellectually honest enough to really look at the underbelly, as it were, the logical implications of your own worldview as an atheist?  Well, again, that’s a really, really interesting question. When I look back on that time, I don’t see any significant drop in the moral standards of my life. I think that I’ve always had a pretty good moral compass, and so from the age of 23 until 27, when my faith was restored, I basically lived for myself, which I suppose in itself is not right, but I don’t remember my life going off the rails. I mean I was teaching at the time. I was enjoying my work as a teacher. I had my life all mapped out. I would go for drinks with friends at the weekend. I would go to the gym a lot. I’d write and publish poetry, so I don’t see any sort of catastrophic decline in behavior. In terms of whether I thought much about the implications of my atheism, the one that really did worry me was the fact that I couldn’t now believe in any sense of an afterlife. And I suppose I was very young and very healthy, and there was no immediate chance of my leaving this mortal coil, as it were, but every now and then, I would stop and think, “Well, what happens when I die?” Because one day I will, no matter how strong and healthy I feel at the moment. No matter how much life is enjoyable, I’m going to eventually leave, and what is there? And I sort of clung onto the thought that there could be an afterlife. Now, there was no God in this afterlife, but this afterlife would somehow be a continuation of what I was doing on earth, which is impossible because my body would be dead and I would be some sort of disembodied fragment. That was one thing that troubled me. And I think that the major problem that I had was a sense of meaninglessness. Now, the problem of pain and suffering, or the problems of pain and suffering, have never been a problem for me. In the sense that I can see a struggle between good and evil in the world, and even as an atheist, I never really used that argument against Christians. My concern as an atheist was whether life had any meaning. That’s why I was drawn to the existential philosophers and Soren Kierkegaard. He was a Christian existentialist. And Martin Heidegger, who actually argued he wasn’t an existentialist, but Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. And their solution, or Sartre’s solution and I assume de Beauvoir’s as well, was that you create your own meaning. There’s no transcendence. And in my bravest moments, that made sense, but every now and then, I would think, “Well, actually, I wouldn’t mind having a transcendent meaning attached to me,” and every now and then, I would have a feeling that I had been created. I didn’t like that feeling because, of course, I had adopted the notion that I am an evolved creature, that I am physical matter that’s highly organized but nothing more, but every now and then, there was a sense that I had been created as well. And in my bravest moments, I would… Let’s say I’d be walking home, and one of the symbols of meaninglessness was the stars. Now, that sounds really strange, but I had come to the conclusion that life was meaningless because it was predetermined. There was nothing you could do to change the course of your life. It just happened to you. And you just had to be brave and try in some way to resist, even though ultimately you’re going to lose.   I would defy the meaninglessness of my life by trying to give it some sort of meaning, but that didn’t seem sufficient. I had this need of something beyond this world actually giving me my purpose, and I didn’t like that thought, that that’s what I wanted. I thought, “How can I think this? This is undermining my integrity as a human being,” but still there was a desire for that. And it was not being able to cope with that meaninglessness that brought me back to Christianity, so in a sense, it was both an emotional and an intellectual movement at the same time that brought me back at the age of 27. So you say it was an emotional and intellectual movement. That existential angst, as it were, and then- So how did you make that movement? Obviously, you were… almost like Lewis’s argument from desire. There was something in you that wanted more. And that there had to be a source underlying that. And so how were you able then to move from this place of wanting and desiring something more but knowing that it didn’t exist in reality? How did you bridge gap from nonbelief towards belief?  Okay. Well, during those I suppose four years of really quite hardened atheism, I never once heard the gospel. The only people who showed any sort of interest in my soul, as it were, were two sets of Jehovah’s Witnesses who knocked on my door, and I was happy to engage them in debate, and I argued from an atheist point of view. But they seemed to be genuinely interested in the state of my soul, but I didn’t have any Christian contact at all. I had two colleagues who were Christians. One was a rather sour, bitter individual, and I thought to myself, “He’s not a very good advert for Christianity.” He had a book on his desk which was titled How to Reach Your Colleagues with the Gospel, and I thought, “Well, you haven’t done a very good job, because no one will listen to you because you’re so unpleasant to talk to.” Yes.  But the other individual was the head of RS, Religious Studies, and he left after a year. He went on to become a Baptist minister, and I was very impressed with him both professionally and personally. I sensed he was a man of integrity. And so that started to make me think again. Maybe there is something to this. But I never attended church. I never heard any gospel proclamation at all. I had not thrown my Bible away, which is interesting. I still had my little red pocket miniature Bible that I’d bought as an undergraduate years earlier. And I didn’t throw it away because I felt that, even though I didn’t believe it, there was something wrong in throwing the Bible in the bin. I couldn’t do it. It was too sacred, as it were, and I couldn’t explain to myself why I felt that way, but I just couldn’t do that. What happened was… I remember standing in my kitchen, and I remember looking up at the clock on the wall because I had to go to work that morning. I was making sure I wasn’t going to be late. And I remember saying the following prayer, I said, “God, if you exist,” — and I do remember saying, “God, if you exist,” — “Would you help me? Would you tell me why I’m here? What am I doing? What is my life for? Where is it going?” So it wasn’t a prayer of repentance. It wasn’t a prayer to say sorry for all the things I’d done wrong or the good things I hadn’t done. It was actually a prayer that was asking God to be a philosopher on my behalf. And to sort out this problem of meaninglessness. And I did not get an answer from God. I didn’t hear a voice. I didn’t see a piece of paper floating down from the ceiling, saying, “Peter, this is your purpose.” What I got instead was what I hadn’t had for a long time and that is a sense of God’s presence and His love again. And my heart started to soften towards Christianity. Now, I didn’t go back to church. I still had no Christian contact. It was as if there were internal forces that had brought me to that point. It wasn’t any sort of external encouragement from friends or acquaintances. It just happened, and I can only imagine that there was some sort of seismic shift within my thinking and my feeling. But again, I couldn’t tolerate this question of meaninglessness or this issue of meaninglessness anymore. And I remember walking to work. I did not drive to work. I liked to walk to clear my mind and think about the day ahead. And I remember feeling someone was walking alongside me, and it felt like Jesus. And I’m not prone to spiritual mystical experiences, but that was very strong, and I thought, “This is becoming real again to me.” And luckily I had a local library where there were some very good commentaries on the Bible, and I remember getting a book out. I can’t remember the name of the author or the name of the book. I can still see his picture, though. He was an elderly man with thick spectacles. But in his book, he wrote about the historical reliability of the New Testament, and for the first time, I came across an actual formal defense of Christianity, and I thought, “I have been wanting something like this for so long!” And I remember reading that book and marveling at this man’s intelligence, his ability to present Christianity as true, and all the thoughts I had about the Bible being a plethora of legends and make believe and superstitious and nonsense, gibberish basically, started to melt away. And my trust, my intellectual trust in Christianity, started to be recreated again. Well, I never had it. It was being created for me. But I didn’t go to church for a year. I stayed away from church. My faith was a very private thing, but it started to grow again. I fell in love with the Bible again. I really like the book of Daniel. I really like the book of Romans. I really like the book of Ruth. And the notion of hell troubled me. I thought, “Well, if people are not repentant, God will put them out of His presence,” but the thing that helped me overcome that was I thought, “Well, look what God has done to stop people from going there. What more could God do?” So that was an important apologetic for me regarding God’s judgment. And it was only when I moved back to the southeast, because I had been teaching in the Midlands, the middle region of Britain. I was living in Lincolnshire, and I moved back to Kent, the southeast, and that’s when I rejoined the church. And I started again to read and explore what apologist Christian philosophers and scientists and writers had to say, and it was a steady education. And I found it to be absolutely vital, and that’s one of the reasons why I get quite irritated if people dismiss apologetics, because that was my lifeline. That’s what reignited my faith. And when people dismiss that and say it’s not important, it’s rather like someone saying, “Well, you were rescued at sea by the Coast Guard, but the Coast Guard is not really important.” “Well, sorry,” you know? Yes!  My salvation is quite important. Yes!  And the salvation of other people who come to faith in that way. So it was a steady movement back. I think what I heard from you, though, is that not only was there a longing but there was a willingness to see, which allowed you to begin not only experiencing a palpable presence of God but also to really actually look at the data, at the, like you say, philosophy and intellectual writings, the substantive writings that really substantiate the Christian worldview.  Yes. I can hear a skeptic in the back of my mind saying, “Well, you just wanted it to be true.” I don’t know. You may have encountered this, but, “You just wanted it to be true, so you see what you want to see, and you wanted Christianity to be true,” But what I know of you is that you are not someone who… Again, intellectual honesty is incredibly critical for you- Yes, it is. Yeah. … as a thinker. As someone who is true to yourself. So I would imagine that, when you began looking at all this material, whether it was the Bible or whether it was philosophy or apologetics, that you looked at it again with a fairly honest and sober perspective. I guess as neutral as one could be. We’re always biased. I mean we cannot escape that. But in a way that was intellectually honest to the material itself. Whether they were presenting adequate arguments and evidence and logic. Whether it was making sense with what you understood about reality. How would you answer someone who might push back on you a little bit about that?  Yes. Well, I’ve thought about this a lot, and I would say that I may have wanted it to be true, but even if, let’s say, my emotions or my heart is driving me in a certain direction, my mind is the gatekeeper and if my mind says no, then the heart stops, as it were. The emotions stop. So I had a drive towards Christianity, but I would not have become a Christian if I had not come to the conclusion that it was true. So I may have wanted it to be true, but I would not have become a Christian if I didn’t think it was true, because in a sense, my mind has the last word on these things. So that’s how I would answer that. And I’d also say that there are atheists who want atheism to be true. They’re equally subjective. I think Thomas Nagel, the famous atheist in New York, has said, “I don’t want God to exist, and I’ll be honest about it.” So I think any atheist or skeptic who wants to make that line of argument, perhaps also ought to consider whether he or she has the same inclination. “I want atheism to be true because I don’t want to have to deal with a metaphysical being or give an account of my life or even lay down my life,” hopefully picking up a new life, an authentic life, but I don’t want to have to take into account somebody or something, an entity or deity or whatever, who in some ways is interested in me. So that’s how I would answer that question. Yes. That’s a great answer.  Thank you. Yeah. And I presume, because of the nature of who you are and your intellectual path and your studies and your teaching pursuits, that you yourself became fully convinced by what you read, whether it was philosophically, biblically, theologically, that the pieces, as it were, kind of came together and gave you a fully orbed understanding of the world, understanding of reality that made sense to you, to your mind, that is the best explanation for what you see and experience, both I guess in the universe out there with regard to historical nature of Christianity, as well as… It sounds like it was fulfilling for you as a person. I presume that you found the meaning, the source of meaning and meaning itself, that you were seeking.  I did, actually. Yes. It’s interesting, because when we think about what is the meaning of life, sometimes it’s very hard to say what it is, but I would say that my worries or concerns about that have been quelled by my knowledge of God. And in a sense also, there’s an element of mystery to this as well, because I obviously… Once we become Christians, everlasting life has already begun, even if we go through the valley of death and we are temporarily separated from our bodies. We are still on that everlasting trajectory. It’s like the potential infinite. And what manner of challenges and developments and excitement lies ahead of this, I think we can only say we have glimpses. I don’t think we fully now what God has in store for us. We know a lot, but we don’t know everything. And there is meaning in that as well. But love has its own way of answering that question, “What is the meaning of life?” Because when a person experiences love for God and experiences God’s love for him or her and then is able to communicate that love to others, that in itself is an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” It’s not a philosophical answer necessarily. It’s not the sort of thing that you could put into a philosophical journal, but it’s an existential response. It’s your manner of living that gives you that sense of purpose. And it’s the most satisfying thing of all. I remember reading somewhere Soren Kierkegaard wrote in one of his journal entries, not long before he died, I think, that he found it amazing that so many people could go through life not realizing that they were loved by God, and that sort of is the tragedy, and that’s why it’s so important to tell people about the love of God, so that they are reunited with their Creator. Some won’t be, unfortunately. I don’t believe everybody will be saved. I’m not a universalist, but thank goodness and thank God for those who are, who are drawn into His kingdom. Peter, now you have mentioned the gospel, referred to it a few times throughout your story, both in childhood, both in your time where you were away from faith, and now you’re speaking of love from Creator. And I wondered if just, in a nutshell, you could describe what the gospel is and how that relates to the love from a Creator?  Yes. Well, I believe that God has given humanity free will, and every human being has chosen to disobey God. We have all fallen short of the glory of God, as we’re told in Romans. We are all sinners. We are described by reformed theology as depraved and degenerate, not because we are totally evil but because every area of our being is infected by sin, and that sin is a law in a sense that people are, in a way, almost… because it’s so ingrained in their personality and character, they feel they are under the compulsion of sin, and the gospel is the recognition that every human being stands guilty before God, because God is a holy God. And the means by which humans are reconciled to God and become God’s children, rather than individuals who face God’s judgment, is through the substitutionary death of Jesus. Jesus, who is God as a human being, the God-man as it were. However you’d like to say it. God the Son assuming human flesh in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, dying of crucifixion, paying the penalty for our sins, and so then we are declared righteous. Our status is righteous. If we so choose to believe and trust in that death, but obviously there’s more to it, in the sense that Jesus is resurrected by His Father. He’s resurrected by his Father’s love, and that means therefore that we are, when we are united with Christ, we are in a way resurrected into a new life. To use perhaps now a rather cliched phrase, we are born again. Now that doesn’t mean to say that we suddenly become perfect, but we are in the process of being sanctified we cannot save ourselves. There’s nothing in us by which we can be saved. It is purely by His grace, which is unmerited favor, that we are saved. It’s His righteousness imputed to us. And that is a covenant that God has with us everlastingly. God will never go back upon what Christ, God the Son, in human personality and form, has done for us. And that invitation is to everybody, so Christianity makes that claim, makes that call to salvation to every single person. And I would add also to that every human being’s made in the image of God, which is one of the most revolutionary doctrines of Judeo-Christian thinking. And the Bible makes it very clear. It says, all are made, male and female—it’s almost as if the writer was anticipating all the rude things said about women and their status. No, no. Everybody. Male, female, whoever they are, wherever they come from, they are all made in the image of God, and we all have that potential to respond to God in a way by which we come to him through salvation. Yes, yes. So, like you say, everyone is loved by God and can be united with their Creator through that love, through the Person of Jesus. Thank you for that.  No worries. And as we’re closing our conversation, I always like to end, particularly with these two questions because you understand, you know, you have lived what it feels like, what you think as an atheist, what it means to be on the other side of things, raising a skeptical eyebrow. But there may be those who are listening who, as you did at one point, perhaps were willing to consider Christianity. What advice would you give to a skeptic or someone who’s curious about Christianity?  Well, I would say I’d consider Christianity at its strongest points. The atheist turned deist philosopher, Antony Flew, said whenever you are criticizing a worldview or a philosophy, take it on at its strongest points. Don’t take on straw men or don’t take on that worldview at its weakest points. Look at what the very best spokespersons are saying on behalf of that worldview, and if you can overcome their arguments, then the rest of the worldview will collapse. It’s rather like Quine’s web of beliefs. There are certain strands within the web upon which the whole web hangs, and if you can cut those, the web will collapse, but if you can’t cut those, then the skeptic has got a lot of thinking, then, to do. “Why am I not able to overturn the evidence for the resurrection?” for instance. “Why is the Kalam cosmological argument so good?” That would be the first thing. I think the second thing is I would say to a skeptic, “Don’t get too caught up in New Atheism,” the Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris brand of atheism, because they do go after the worst examples. It’s very important to look at the very best of what Christianity has to say, and don’t listen to the New Atheists, who specialize in attacking Christianity at its sort of, I suppose its worst parts, in terms of individual Christian behavior and whatever. What I mean by that is I don’t think there are any intellectual weaknesses in the Christian case, but you can certainly point to Christian individuals whose behavior can be imprudent. The other thing I would say is please don’t expect Christians to be perfect in their behavior. No Christian, I think, should be saying that they can be perfect in this life. We are being sanctified. We still make mistakes. We still do wrong things. I believe that habits, sinful habits and patterns, are broken, but certainly Christians can fall into sin. It’s an exception, I think, but they can still do it, and therefore, the skeptics shouldn’t be looking for perfection in us. So those are the three things that I would say. Another thing is, you know, I’ve met quite a few skeptics who criticize the Bible, but they haven’t actually read it, so I would suggest that skeptics, perhaps one weekend, make a nice cup of coffee or tea, put your feet up, read the Bible, have a commentary at hand so you can understand some of it, because I think there’s a bit of laziness going on with some skeptics, who will say, “Well, the Bible’s a load of fairy tales.” “Have you actually read it?” “No.” “Okay, so I think you need to go and read it first before you can come to a conclusion on it.” So those would be the four things that I would say to skeptics from my own experience. That’s some great advice.  Thank you. And, Peter, for the believers, for those who have a heart for those who don’t believe and want to engage in a meaningful, perhaps an intellectually credible way, what would you say to them?  I think I have more to say to the Christians than I do to the skeptics. I would say to Christians, “Please don’t think all atheists are the same.” I mean, I am aware that the atheist philosopher John Gray, in his book, he says that there are seven types of atheism historically. And so therefore when we’re dealing with atheists and skeptics, they do come in different categories. I’ve sort of identified, in my own experience, three. There are the anti-theists who really are adamantly opposed to the idea of God and religion, and Christopher Hitchens fits in that camp. There are the indifferent atheists who would say, “Well, whether God exists or not, my life carries on the way it’s going,” and then there are the theistic atheists who want there to be a God but can’t see any reason to think there is one, and I’ve encountered a few of those in my time. And they’re a very interesting group of people. There’s a novelist in England called Julian Barnes who has gone on record as saying, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him,” and I thought that was a very interesting statement. So we need to take the atheists as they come. I think also I would say that, for me and for many other skeptics—well, when I was a skeptic and for other skeptics, often we are the only evidence they have of God. The messenger and the message can’t be separated. So 1 Peter 3:16 talks about giving a reason for the hope that’s within you, but it does say sanctify your hearts and do present those reasons with meekness and fear, or respect and humility in some of the more modern translations. So the reason why the message and the messenger go together in the gospel is because we are saying God can transform us. God can take a rotten personality and start to create a work of art. So if the skeptic can’t see evidence in our own lives of that proposition, then he or she is going to ignore us. And it’s so important that we watch the quality of our lives. I mean, for example, I led an Alpha course at a local church a couple of years ago, and I remember saying to this group of skeptics—I had all the hard bitten atheists in my group. The other Alpha leader, she had some really nice people, but I had all of the obnoxious hard skeptics who wanted an argument with me. And I don’t know why I got them. I can’t imagine. But anyway, after a couple of weeks, when I had sort of gained their trust, I said to them, “Is it the case that you want me to present evidence of God’s existence?” and they said, “No. It’s not that. And I didn’t press them on it, but I realized that I was the evidence, that they were assessing me. They were trying to work out how authentic I was. “Does this guy really believe what he’s saying? And if we’re sort of pretty harshly skeptical with him, will he still welcome us? Will he still be kind to us? Will he forgive us?” So I felt as if I was going through a personality test. That’s really important. And the other thing I would say is that the church really generally needs to grow up in its behavior towards doubting Christians. I think doubting Christians need to be handled very carefully and gently and to be restored gently, and people shouldn’t be treated as if they are carrying some sort of virus because they are in doubt. There has to be… I’m not going to use the phrase “safe space.” I can’t stand it. Let’s use the good old term sanctuary or refuge. There has to be a sanctuary, a place where they can air their doubts and for people to listen to them and then say, “Well, have you thought of this?” “Have you considered reading this?” “I can’t give you a straightforward answer at the moment, but I’ll come back with something,” because I’m aware of some very high-profile people who went to their ministers with questions and doubts, and they were told, “Well, you’ve fallen into sin. You’re a terrible sinner. You are doubting the truth,” rather than saying to them, “Okay, let’s sit down, and let me to listen to what you’re saying to me. And then let me tell you some ways in which you can rethink what’s happening,” and perhaps ease the doubt out of them. And just very quickly—I’m aware of the time. One other thing is, in particular, before young people go to university or go out into the world of work, they may have grown up in a Christian cocoon, but they’re going to go in an environment where people are going to be quite merciless with their faith. I mean, some people will respect it. Others will be indifferent to it. But as I found out with my friend in my second year, there are people who will take you on, so what are we teaching these young people about the reasons why their Christians. I know of a tragic case recently of an individual who went to university to study a science subject, and she went as a Christian and she came out as an atheist because she could not square evolution with Christianity. And that’s so profoundly sad. Yes.  And I know that her parents are distraught about this. Yes.  And this is what’s at stake here. So those are the things I would say. Those are excellent. Again, Peter- Thank you. We have been the recipients of a rich not only story but also wisdom based upon your years of deep consideration and living and thinking and really working out what is true, what is meaningful, what is real. And so I just want to express deep appreciation to you for your very thoughtful and articulate story, as well as all of the wisdom that you’ve given to us today.  Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. That’s much appreciated. Thank you. Well, I know that many will be blessed by listening to this, so again, thank you.  Good. Good. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Peter’s story. You can find out more about Peter and locate his writings by looking more closely at 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, subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how someone else flips the record of their life.