eX-skeptic

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.   

After skeptic Rick Allan was presented with Christianity and its effects on his family, he began to investigate the evidence for God and Christianity.   Rick’s website: askepticsjourney.com Greg Koukl: Tactics – A Game plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions J. Warner Wallace: Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels Unbelievable? podcast with Justin Brierley: https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes Justin Brierley’s book: Unbelievable?: Why After Talking with Atheists for Ten Years I’m Still a Christian 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. There is a general presumption among atheists that there is no evidence for God, so they do not look, and they find what they do not seek, disbelief. But what happens when someone actually challenges that presumption and decides to investigate the evidence for themselves and that genuine search changes their minds? That is the story of Rick Allan. He was a self-professed skeptic and former atheist who turned Christian. He challenged himself, pursued the truth, and discovered that there was a substantial amount of evidence for both God and Christianity. Today, he’s here to talk about his journey from atheism to a strong belief in God. I hope you’ll come along and listen to what he found. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Rick! It’s so great to have you here today to tell your story. Well, thanks a lot. I’m really excited to be here and share it. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so we’ll know a little bit about you, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. I live in the US, Midwest US for all my life. I grew up in Milwaukee and then moved to Minneapolis about 25 years ago with my wife, and we’ve been married for 27 years now, and two kids. They’re twins, a boy and a girl, and they are 19 years old and just starting college. We’ll you’re from the cold country. I’ve spent some time in Minnesota and in Wisconsin myself in different jobs, but you are from Milwaukee. You said you grew up there. Tell me what your world was like growing up in Milwaukee from the sense of your culture, from your family. Was there any sensibility of God in that world? There was. But it didn’t really affect me very much, I would say. We attended a Methodist church, I remember, growing up. And at some point, I don’t know, I was probably 10, 12 years old, something like that, my mom and dad moved to a nondenominational church. I don’t really know why. I remember my brothers and sisters were really angry because they had to be confirmed in the Methodist church and I got out of that because now we’re nondenominational. Right. Really, though, we went to church occasionally. I don’t remember any sermon or message from that time. It was really just something I had to do because we went with my parents. So I didn’t really have a lot from that perspective. I would say when I became a teenager, I didn’t even go to church anymore, and I kind of became… I don’t know. When I went to high school anyways, they were called freaks and jocks. And I kind of went the freak way, which just meant I partied and did things in the culture that some people don’t think you should do, with alcohol and all that kind of fun stuff. So there was really no religion at that point or God or anything. It just wasn’t even in the cards. It wasn’t a thing. So did your family accept your unwillingness or your decision not to participate in any kind of a church activity? You know, we didn’t even talk about it, to be honest. There was a lot of things going on with my family. My brothers and sister both had some problems, and my mom had some problems, and we moved out to Utah temporarily and came back after a couple of months. It just wasn’t a good time for the family, so I was pretty much on my own as a teenager, and there just wasn’t anything about God or religion in the picture. So when you stopped going, did you just kind of release that part of your life without much thought? Or was it something that you decided to take on a nonreligious identity, like agnostic or atheistic?  I’d have to say I was agnostic. There literally was not any thought put to it that I can remember. So did you even consider what belief in God was? What did you think that religion was, apart from something that you just left behind? Back then, I mean, it just was such a non-event. It just wasn’t there. It just was not on the radar? Not at all. Yeah. And so what happened next in your journey? You were a teenager, you were partying, you just were being an average, I guess, teenager, high schooler around that time, and you didn’t think about God or religion much. What happened next in your life? Well, I did go to college, and somehow I found a way to do well in my studies, which I didn’t in high school. And still maintain that lifestyle. So things were pretty, I would say, fun in college. Not knowing any different way. And then I had an internship in Milwaukee in my last semester, and that’s when I met my wife. She had an overlapping internship. She was going to Eau Claire in Wisconsin, and so that’s where we met. I actually interviewed her for the job, which was kind of fun. She was a believer but not a follower, I guess is the best way I could put it. She’d go to church sometimes, but she pretty much joined me in my lifestyle. We have kind of a joke that, during that time of life, that I didn’t force her to do anything. I just kind of showed the yellow brick road, and she just walked along with me on it. But the fun, if I want to call it fun, started after college. Some time after college something happened to her. She had a drive to Milwaukee from Minneapolis with her sister, and her sister basically told her—I don’t know exact words, but ‘Did you know you can have a relationship with Jesus? Did you know it can change your life?’ kind of a thing. And she started to change. She went to church on Sundays without me. She became part of a small group which, at the time I didn’t even know what a small group meant. And I just really wanted nothing to do with it. I was afraid religion would take away the fun that we were having. I don’t know if you’ve heard—you’ve been around the Midwest here, so you probably know who Jesse Ventura is? Oh, yes. He was governor of Minnesota right around this time. And he did an interview for Playboy magazine, of all magazines, and in that interview, he has a quote, and I use this a lot in my talks. It’s, “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers,” and I really, really resonated with that. So that’s where I was at that time. That was when we had moved to Minneapolis. There was a good side of it for me, is I could get a lot of stuff done. She was off doing her church thing, and I was doing projects. I’m a handyman, so I was doing a lot of projects. So from that perspective, I didn’t mind it too much. So you didn’t resent her for having moved more towards this seemingly religious life? Well, I wouldn’t go that far. There was some resentment there. I didn’t want her to do it. Because, again, at that time, you just thought it was a crutch. It was for weak people, weak-minded people? Yeah, I thought she was going to become a Bible thumper, and you know, some of the things that our lifestyle included, I knew were not included in a Christian or in a religious fashion. How long did you all move in this direction where she was moving towards God and you were not? Yeah. It was for quite a few years. So this was probably around the year 1996, or somewhere in there, and our kids were born in 2001, and she started taking them to church, and again, it was nice. I would have Sundays pretty much, in the mornings, to myself. I finished our basement and did some other things. But when the kids were like four or five, my sister once talked to me about, ‘You know, you really should go to church to support her,’ and my wife asked me to start going for our son because our son was like, “Why? I don’t want to do this.” So I started going with her to church to support her. But I think this is probably when I’d start labeling myself an atheist. Hm. Yeah. Church really turned me off. The whole idea of the Bible being a fairy tale, kind of made up. I really thought it grew over time, like the telephone game. And the thing about church was I never once remember any evidence being provided, about God, about Jesus. It was just Bible verses and talking about the Bible, and I always thought the worship just went on forever, and of course, at the end, then they always asked for your money. Right. So yeah, I was going the other way by going to church. Interesting, interesting. As you were going the other way and embracing more of an atheist identity, were you looking more at the foundations of your own atheism? You had mentioned there was no foundational evidence for the Christian worldview being presented, but what about your atheism? Were you thoughtfully moving in that direction, like from an intellectual perspective? Or was it more because Christianity seemed rather anti-intellectual and just very off putting? It was just off putting. It was all emotional. I didn’t know anything. I’ll just be honest. I didn’t want this, and I didn’t like it. I thought it was made up. One year, I went with my wife to a youth retreat. She had gotten involved in the youth group, and she asked me to go. It’s an extended weekend. And that really turned me off, too, because I just thought, “Now we’re trying to get these kids to believe this, too.” The ironic thing is, some years later, my wife and I actually ended up being directors of that youth retreat for about 200+ kids, so things did change. Yes, they did! But at that time, it was adding more fuel to the fire, I guess, for you to turn away from all of that, towards atheism. Yes, yes. So I’m curious, were there other atheists in your world? People who believed similarly to you that reinforced your views? Or were you pursuing atheism more strongly on your own? Yeah, I wouldn’t even call it pursuing. I wasn’t trying to be an atheist. That’s just where I was. And I’m a big introvert. I like being alone. So I don’t have a lot of friends outside of my marriage, but none of them that I did hang out with even, the ones I talked to from college, none of them—there was never religious talk. We just never really went there. That wasn’t part of our culture. In the upper Midwest, it seems to be a nominally Christian or Catholic culture, is that right? So there’s a presumption of God somewhere in- Yeah. I think that’s true. Yeah. Yeah. So I would imagine you would find yourself in many ways a bit alone, in terms of your identity, just because of your circumstance and your personality. Yeah. Yeah. So your wife is continuing on in a Christian pursuit. She’s bringing your children. And getting indoctrinated, I guess, in your view. So what then happened next? Well, so my first inkling that maybe something… I should start looking at this. It was the year 2006, and I had finished my first triathlon, and it wasn’t an Iron Man Triathlon by any means, but it was a triathlon, so it took a few months to train, to build up to do that. I hadn’t been a big exerciser before that. So I was working pretty hard at it. And I’ll never forget the feeling I had when I crossed the finish line. My kids and my wife were there, cheering me on, and I expected this accomplishment. And as I went across the finish line, the thought that came into my head was, “What’s next?” And I was like, “What is that about?” And I realized I had a really good time filling up my time. I had a lot of hobbies, and some of them are kind of unusual, so I was a volunteer firefighter, EMT, a lot of the civil service kind of stuff. Ambulance driver, weather spotter, and even a sheriff’s reserve deputy, and all of that took up my time, and I was just filling up all my time with stuff. And it started me thinking, “Well, what’s life about? What’s our purpose? Am I just going to keep… What happens when I can’t exercise anymore? And what happens when this stuff goes away?” That was probably my first… started me just thinking. I really didn’t do anything about it. It just started me thinking. And the real catalyst then for the change was about a year after that. There was an organization called Life Action, and it came to our church, so I went with my wife, and I think it was four nights in a row. And our kids were about six years old, and what really hit me hard was the message that they talked about with morals and teaching your kids good morals. And I realized, “I’m going to have to start doing that even more so with my kids as they get a little older,” and I told you about my story. I wasn’t a good kid. I didn’t want my kids… I got lucky. I got really lucky to get out of that. And I didn’t want my kids to go down that path, but if I told them that and they could find pictures of me or whatever, they heard the stories, I would’ve been a hypocrite. I would have been saying, “Do as I say, not as I do,” and I didn’t think that’s a very good way to teach. And it occurred to me that—I’d been going to church now for some years, not liking it, but it occurred to me that Christianity was actually a really good standard, what Jesus taught was a really good standard. Of course, if it’s applied correctly, right? Because a lot of Christians, including myself, aren’t always the best at applying it correctly. But that’s what really started me thinking. I’m a real big skeptic, a self-professed skeptic. And I’ll question everything. Even if I want to buy something from Amazon, I’ll research it so much because I don’t want to be wrong. But I realized I never… You asked this earlier. I never questioned atheism. I never even thought about it. And so this is when my journey started, that I realized I probably needed to start figuring this stuff out. I know you say you really hadn’t questioned atheism. When I think about that, I think of not only the foundations for atheism or the grounding of it but also the implications. Like you mentioned a moment ago that you were wondering about what’s life all about, meaning, purpose, where do I ground morals? Did you realize at the time that your atheism didn’t provide some sense of objective grounding for those things? Or were those just more existential things that you felt and you really hadn’t associated them with your atheism? Yeah. Really the latter. I really hadn’t associated. And actually I did about five years of intensive study on this stuff, and morals, believe it or not, were actually towards the end of really understanding that and putting it all together, that atheism and naturalism, you can’t really ground morals, but that was actually pretty late in the journey, where I kind of put that together. Ah, I see. So you came to a point of realization, then, in your story that you said you never questioned atheism. What does that mean to you in terms of… How did you pursue that skepticism, that questioning, that question of atheism? What did that look like? Yeah. For me, it was mostly podcasts, debates, and books. I just started reading and thinking, and I listened to a lot of podcasts on my commute. Now, back then I don’t remember all the technology, but I remember I always had to burn them to discs the night before to put them in my car. So I was burning CDs to listen to podcasts, and I don’t even remember all the podcasts back then, but that’s a lot. I just kind of immersed myself in the realm of this and listening to those kind of things. At one point, the youth pastor at my church, he knew I was going through this journey, and he would just slip me little things. If you’ve heard of Greg Koukl and putting stones in your shoes, yeah, I think this youth pastor did that really well. I mean, he knew me and he knew he couldn’t just tell me this is right or whatever. I had to figure that out myself. So yeah. So I listened and read and learned, and I was actually quite astonished by what I didn’t know. So, for example, even where I lived or how I grew up, I actually didn’t understand that Christmas was about Jesus Christ and that Christmas songs were about Him and about the story and things about hospitals and universities and relief organizations, they’re Christianity based. And I’d like to say I was deceived, but I think I was more ignorant than deceived. I was shocked. I was just shocked by what I learned. So you started putting some pieces together, and I presume, along the way, you started asking some of the big questions, like, “How do we know that God exists?” and those kinds of big philosophical, theological questions? Yeah. I’m an evidence person. So I started with God. Because I figured, “Well, if there’s no God, I don’t have to look at anything else.” So I started looking at the evidence. What evidence could I find that would potentially convince me of God or not? Is there good evidence of naturalism? Is there good evidence of the creation kind of view. So that’s where I started. And then I went to Christianity after I went to God. I would say I first became a deist. Deism is actually kind of easy. If you look at the evidence and you think there’s a higher being, which I think the evidence is pretty good for, obviously, getting to deism’s really easy, because now I can just say there’s a god, but he doesn’t really actively play in our world or anything, and so I could just stop there. And that seemed too easy to me. So I did pursue the religions and looked at least the main religions to finally come to a conclusion of God and Christianity being the truth. I’m going to back up for just a moment because the whole idea of evidence, especially in the world of atheism, is that you often hear the claim that there is no evidence for God, right? Right. So I’m curious what evidence you found that convinced you that God exists, that He’s not a product, a man-made product. He’s not the end of a legendary tale. But rather that there is truly an ontological essence in reality to the Person of God. There is Someone really there outside of the universe. What evidence led you to determine that that was true or real? Sure, sure. Part of it’s a cumulative case. There’s a lot of, I think, lines of evidence that point to it, and when you’re looking at a picture, it may not be complete, but is it more complete than the other option. So that’s a lot of what I believe, but by far the most convincing thing for me was DNA, was the complexity of life. The code that is in the DNA . I cannot understand looking at that, how you cannot think that there is something behind that. There’s intelligence behind that. Any time you have codes, any time you see some pattern like that, it’s from intelligence. The alternative was naturalism, and the theory of evolution. If it was evolution, then it was orchestrated by something. If it was creation, then it was orchestrated by the Creator. There’s machinery in our cells. I do believe in the irreducible complexity of some of these things. And just the complexity of the cell itself. And back when Darwin made his theories, they didn’t know any of this stuff. That is by far what immediately pretty much convinced me there had to be something more than just chance and random mutations over millions of years. That there was a mind behind the immense information in the cell? There’s always a mind behind information. We don’t look at anything else and say, “Well, that just happened by chance.” We don’t look at machines and say, “That just happened by chance.” If I went to the moon and there was, “Help,” scribbled on something on the moon, we wouldn’t say that just happened by chance by the nature. We wouldn’t have any idea who did it, right? But we wouldn’t say, “Oh, yeah. That was just made up. That just happened because nature must’ve done it because we can’t explain it other ways.” So the God hypothesis is really, for you, the best explanation behind what we see in the intelligent complexity of the cell and that naturalism on its own, with its just random variations and mutations, isn’t sufficient to explain it. Is that what you’re saying basically? Yeah. Yeah. And then you add on things like near-death experiences and the afterlife and fine tuning of the universe, and then you do come to the moral argument, and you just start putting those together, and the better explanation—it’s not airtight. I’m not going to ever be 100%. But the better explanation is certainly a God or a supreme being of some sort that created all this. So you came to a place where you were confident that a supreme being exists. Yes. Like you say, you moved towards deism and that that was a rather… it was a step in a direction towards belief, certainly a belief in a higher being, but not necessarily in any particular religion. So then you mentioned that you started looking at the major religions. So if there was a god, then which religion worships the right god? How did you tease that out? How did you pursue that? Yeah. I think again more from an evidential standpoint. So looking at the history of the religions, looking at their artifacts, if they have writings, looking at their leaders, and I don’t remember much about all the details back then, but it seemed that Christianity was evidentially better. I still didn’t understand the relationship and all that kind of stuff, but I got to a point where I believed it enough that I started moving forward. But as I’ll mention in a little bit, I actually kind of came backwards for a while. In 2011, when I knew I had changed and kind of figured enough out is I was camping. I used to camp every year with a college buddy, and that was back with the hedonistic kind of lifestyle, and I’d relive that on weekends camping sometimes, even though I’d changed for the most part at home. But this one time, we were up late at night, Saturday night around the campfire, and I ended up defending why I thought God and Christianity was true. I became an apologist that night. Wow! Yeah. That’s when I knew, “Okay, I think I’m probably moving in this direction. I need to keep going,” so I ended up becoming baptized. I kind of went all in. I attended Alpha at our church. I became an Alpha leader. I threw away all of my magazines. I changed all my playlists. I like to say I used to choose my movies by the content, and then I filtered it by them. And I was kind of all in. But I actually kind of changed my mind twice. I use hiking as a metaphor . When you hike uphill and you’re hiking up a big mountain, there’s a lot of switchbacks. You don’t just go straight up. And for a skeptic like me, it’s really hard to believe this stuff. And so I was doing these switchbacks, and then sometimes you get up almost to the peak. You can even see the peak. But weather turns you back or whatever, and you have to retreat. So I ended up retreating. This was about five years ago, 2015, somewhere in there. I started doubting again, and I kind of kept it a secret from most people, but I was like, “Did I really look at all this stuff impartially?” I have so many Christians around me, and as you mentioned, Minnesota’s got a lot of religion. The US has a lot of religion to it. So did that influence me? How impartial I was. So I went back to the drawing board. I started listening to things and reading things again, and I got to the point where I had just found myself saying, “I’ve heard that argument. I’ve heard that.” It started becoming repetitive. And then, I downloaded a book called Cold Case Christianity by J Warner Wallace. And that book was a game changer for me. I’m sure you’re familiar with that book. Yes, yes. Yeah. That was a game changer for me because it’s so law enforcement based, and I have some of that in my background, and law enforcement evidence, it’s so tangible. And when he described the disciples as eyewitnesses and the Gospel being eyewitness accounts, that’s another thing that just blew me away. All this time, I had never really heard that. I’d never seen that. And that was a game changer for me, along with the reasonable tests. The whole “beyond a reasonable doubt, not all doubt,” all that kind of stuff. And that put me past the hurdle again. That book was really good. Yes. J. Warner Wallace for those who aren’t familiar. He was, still is, a cold-case detective, and so he knows how to look at evidence, especially from a historical past and long past and look at what evidence is viable and what can be held as evidence, and then applies it to actually the events surrounding the person of Jesus, and you can draw conclusions based on what he brings forth in that book. And obviously it was convincing to you, right? Absolutely. Okay. Well, I’m curious. You mentioned the first apostles as eyewitnesses, but what role did the Bible and the Gospel, both of those, play in your conversion journey, if any? Well, they did once I got to the evidence of those as well. So I was also astonished by the accuracy of the Bible, from the archaeology to everything in it, the stories, the people, the titles that they used, the geography, the town names, everything is so accurate. It became pretty evident to me that it was a work of nonfiction, not a work of fiction. And if all of that is nonfiction, all those archaeological and towns and all those things, that was a clue to me that the story actually didn’t grow over time. And when you think about the telephone game, if you tell a story, and somebody whispers it, all the way down the line, and then at the end, the story is completely different. What occurred to me was, if the Christian story… It’s not just part of the story that gets corrupted. It’s the whole thing. Nothing is like the beginning. So you can’t say that the Bible and all its accuracy is good, but the Christian stories must’ve grown over time. It doesn’t work that way. Everything grows over time. So that tells me that the stories are… Now they may or may not be true, but they are at least the stories that were told from the beginning. Because they didn’t grow over time. But then you look at the character of the eyewitnesses that wrote these stories and the radical change that happened because of what they say they saw, not because of what someone told them or something that happened in the culture. It’s, “This is what we saw,” and it radically changed their lives, and some of them were Jews and they convinced other Jews, and something amazing must’ve happened. And there’s lots of theories of why… wasn’t the resurrection, you know, hallucination theory and all these other theories, but it all boils down to me that these eyewitnesses did what they did because of what they saw. What they say they saw. And all those other theories don’t work because they say they saw a resurrected Jesus. So those were the things that really drove me to, “You know what? This is a pretty accurate story, and I can’t think of any other reason for why it happened,” and I looked at miracles and things like that and came to the conclusion that miracles are possible and still can happen. That’s what really convinced me on the Christianity thing. So it became intellectually convincing to you that it not only provided the best explanation for what you were seeing in the physical world but then the evidence for Christianity seemed to be solid historically, archaeologically, even textually, and from the words of the eyewitnesses and those kinds of things, including the resurrection. Yeah. And put those same tests to the other religions. They don’t do so well. Yeah. There aren’t very many religions that are grounded in historical time and space, that are factually oriented and can be tested. Yeah. And the ones that can be tested don’t test very well. Right, right. But there’s a difference between believing something intellectually, in your mind, that, yes, this could’ve happened, yes, this could’ve been true. This is relatively convincing. But then there’s the Person of Jesus and there are the claims of Jesus, not only that He is God but He is truth and that,  He offers something for us, and we call that the Gospel. It’s good news. There must’ve been a point at which you, as your wife did, said, “Okay, there’s more to this than religion. There is something relational about it.” Can you talk about that? How that related to your own life? Yeah. And Warner Wallace talks about “belief in” versus “belief that,” and so a good analogy he uses is a bulletproof vest. You can have belief that it’s going to stop a bullet, but until you’re willing to stand in front of a gun and test it, you may not have belief in. And so it’s that believing in, and I mean I’ll just be perfectly honest, it’s a struggle for me, as a skeptic, just in that nature of mine, to give in that way. But I’m always working on it. And what I do is I believe that God talks to us in our conscience. So that’s kind of how I live my life, is going where I feel He wants me to go. And that’s kind of my relationship with Him and how I go about it. Yeah. It sounds like your intentionally tuned in, as it were, to His role in your life and following God and Jesus. So that’s amazing. Would you say that your life has changed a good bit since you moved from atheism to Christianity? I’m sure your wife is probably pretty happy about it, so that you are both on the same page. Yeah. She was praying. A lot of people were praying for a long time, but she also knew she couldn’t push it. But yeah, night and day, from a life perspective and life-living perspective, it’s night and day. My mentality, too, of seeing other people and that they have a viewpoint, that they’re hurting, that I have to look at them, it’s an outward versus an inward kind of viewpoint, that God created that person. That person has worth. But everything else has changed, too. Like I said, movies and how we live our life and how we brought up our kids. And it’s been great from that perspective. That’s wonderful! Now you had mentioned one of the things that caused you to question your own atheism was when you were living your life, and it seemed that you had temporary purpose and meaning and hobbies and accomplishments but they didn’t seem to satisfy. You’d be having to look for what’s next. Would you say that, in some sense, Christianity has changed your perspective or your understanding of what your life’s meaning and purpose is? Yeah. And I’ve read The Purpose Driven Life a couple of times and tried to apply some of that, and I think what comes out of that, for me, is going back to my purpose is to do what God directs me to do. I don’t know exactly what that’ll be. Right now, He’s directed me to speak about this, to present this to other people, to use what I’ve learned as a skeptic to present it. And that consumes a lot of my time now. Well, it sounds like you are a life driven by purpose now, if you’re consumed by it, and that’s a really wonderful thing. Yeah. So if there are curious skeptics listening into your story today and you wanted to give them some advice based on your journey and as an ongoing skeptic, I guess in some sense you are- Oh yeah. … continuing to pursue the questions of life and evidences and how to answer those and what worldview provides the best explanation, those kinds of things. What would you say to someone who might be listening, if they are curious skeptics. Perhaps they’re a little dissatisfied with their own worldview. As a skeptic, realize you may not have all the answers. I don’t have all the answers. I still doubt sometimes. I mean that’s okay. It’s okay to have some doubts. I have problems with things, like prayer that’s not always answered and all don’t go to heaven. I really struggle with the fact that I’m thriving and some people are just surviving. There’s a lot of problems with the world.  But not liking something and not liking the way things are doesn’t make something untrue. When my daughter started dating, I didn’t like it at all, but it didn’t mean it was untrue. So be open as a skeptic. Things you may not like may still be the truth, so you need to look at that. From a social media perspective, I personally say no, don’t even go to social media. People are just so mean. I don’t like going there. I would say look for truth and look for both sides. There’s an explanation usually for both sides. Atheists give it and Christians give it. They have the same evidence they’re looking at. They don’t have different evidence. They just come to different conclusions. And they can be extremely…I mean I actually thought that Christians were not very educated or easily persuaded, maybe deluded kind of a thing, and I came to realize that there are some really educated and intelligent Christians, way more than I am, so be open to that. Listen to the experts, but ultimately you have to be the juror on the case. You have to look at the evidence they’re looking at, just like you would in a court of law. Here’s the evidence. I have prosecutors telling me one way. I have the defendant telling me to look at the evidence this way. Which is more reasonable? That’s what I did, and I ended up changing my mind. So that’s what I would say to nonbelievers. That strikes me, that in that posture of your own search, you were trying to be as neutral as you could and allowing the evidence to lead you where it did, rather than having a predisposition or a closed offness. Is that a word? I think so. That you weren’t closed to what you were seeing. That you actually were open to consider the evidence, even if it wasn’t something that you really liked. I liked what you said there, that just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not true and that we need to be honest enough to go where the evidence leads. Yeah, I think that’s really important when you’re looking at evil and suffering. That’s a hard thing to look at, and an easy thing to say there can’t be a God because of evil and suffering, but if, to your point earlier when you talked about it, is naturalism, if you apply it honestly. If you really look at atheism and naturalism and materialism honestly, then you can’t ground evil and suffering. There really isn’t evil and suffering. So yeah. Yeah. Yes. So thank you for that. And as we turn to those believers or Christians who are listening who really want to help others to understand the truth of God’s existence and the reality of Jesus and the Christian worldview, how would you encourage them to engage with those who really don’t know? Well I think you first have to look at the person. Because we all have different personalities. If they’re a skeptic. If they’re like, “I don’t believe any of that. It’s not true,” don’t start with the Bible. And don’t start with Jesus quotes and pray about it and, “Well, just have a relationship.” That is actually a turn-off to most skeptics. They’re like, “Yeah. That’s why I’m not going there.” Be prepared to have evidence or at least point them to the evidence, point them to books or point them to something to say, “There’s something out there evidentially that you can go look at.” And let them research themselves, as Greg Koukl said. Put a stone in their shoe. But don’t try to convince them with the Bible or any of that stuff. Because they’re not there yet. Maybe turn them on to say, “Did you know the Bible’s really accurate?” and them go try to figure that out themselves. That’s what I would say for skeptics and how to approach skeptics. Well, that’s good. I think you’re leading with questions, right? To, like you say, put a stone in their shoe, referencing Greg Koukl’s Tactics book, if anyone’s interested in that. You’ve referenced that a few times. It’s really excellent in terms of starting conversations with… Putting something in their mind, like a stone in the shoe, for them to think about. For them to consider. Something that bothers them in a good way. Right. Yeah. So I think knowing resources is really good, and I think what you’re also saying is that we don’t have to know all of the answers in order to engage, although it’s helpful to know something, but also at very minimum, to know where someone can look to provide resources to help those who are really interested in things of evidence, but yeah. This is fantastic. Yes. The other podcast that I’d recommend people point to… Obviously, this is a really good one because you hear people’s stories. The other one that really I liked was the Unbelievable? podcast by Justin Brierley. And the reason is because it really usually is a very civil conversation between an atheist and a theist or a Christian, so you can hear both sides of the story in a nice civil way. I really liked that podcast as well. Yes, that’s my top podcast. I listen to it without fail every week. I think it really is… As you say, it’s not only the content between juxtaposing two worldviews, it’s really excellent because it has high-level guests on there who are extremely knowledgeable, but also the way in which they’re able to engage. I think in a very civil and diplomatic way, really listening to one perspective and responding, rather than just coming at the other person. Yeah. We’ve lost the art of civil discourse, and I love Unbelievable? for that. Of course, it is the British way, but Justin Brierley does truly an amazing job of moderating, sometimes in potentially contentious perspectives. So I am in total agreement with you on that recommendation. All of the- And his book is pretty good, too. Yes! I mean, if you’re a skeptic, it’s interesting to read a book from someone who’s heard all the arguments for ten years and goes a particular way. Yes. I think his subtitle is something like… I think the title of the book is Unbelievable? Why after Ten Years of Listening to Skeptics I’m Still a Christian. Something like that yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it’s been great. I will put all of the resources that you’ve mentioned in your story in the episode notes, in case someone is interested in that, but as far as you, Rick, thank you so much for coming on today and telling us your story. I appreciate your transparency, especially really letting us know who you are as a skeptic and that you always will be a skeptic and that that actually is not a bad thing. I think we all need to be thoughtful about our own worldviews. Like Socrates says, the unquestioned life is not worth living, and so I think we need to continually be thinking and rechecking and seeing where we are and making sure that we too are responsible for finding and adhering to those truths which we find are supported by the best explanation of evidence and the reality of what makes sense, to what not only we understand but what we experience, and it sounds like the Christian worldview has really brought a lot to you in your life, and I’m so happy about that. Thank you again for coming on board today. You’re welcome, and I’d just like to say, too, I am presenting this information. I like to give the case for God and the case for Christ, so if anyone’s interested in having me speak, I’d love to do it, particularly in the Midwest, but I’m open to other options as well. That’s perfect, and why don’t you give us the name of your website and address so that they can find that. Yeah, it’s A Skeptic’s Journey, so it starts with just the letter a, askepticsjourney.com. Perfect. And I will put that in the episode notes as well, so anyone who would like to get a hold of Rick or have him come speak with you or to you or even virtually I presume, I’m sure he would be happy to do that. All right. Thank you again. You’re welcome. I really enjoyed the time talking about it. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Rick’s story today. You can find his website and his recommended resources on the podcast episode notes. For questions and feedback about this particular episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll 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 will see how someone else flips the record of their life.  

Former atheist Marie Wood shares her journey from losing faith to finding belief in God and Christianity. She discusses her upbringing, intellectual doubts, and encounters with different perspectives. This podcast explores her deep-rooted Christianity and highlights the importance of reviewing our spiritual lives. Marie's story captures the transformative power of reconnecting with God and the independence of intellectual pursuits.

Former atheist Jon Noyes was driven to fully live out his life-long atheism, but his pursuit was challenged when he began to consider which worldview best fit with reality.   Recommended Resources A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions – Greg Koukl The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important That Happens in Between – Greg Koukl The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus – Gary Habermas and Michael Licona   CSLI Events & Resources How to Pray for Others who are Suffering with Nancy Guthrie January 21, 2022 at 8:00 pm Eastern Registration Link   C.S. Lewis Institute Spiritual Checkup please go to www.cslewisinstitute.org/asc  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 once been an atheist but who unexpectedly became a Christian. Often, those who are resolute in their own worldview don’t seem to change, but sometimes they do, and we are generally curious as to how that happens.  Today, we’ll be listening to Jon Noyes’ surprising journey from atheism to Christianity. As an atheist, Jon’s list for reasons for disbelief in God and Christianity was long. In my research survey, he listed twelve distinct reasons supporting his once-held atheism. They range from lack of intellectual evidence and rationality to negative experience with Christian hypocrisy, from social and moral disdain to a personal distaste for religious people and institutions. There was hardly an unchecked box on the survey. He even took extra time to type in his strongly atheistic view that Christians were deluded and superstitious people who needed to change their false presuppositions and false beliefs. For him, atheism was objective, known through science, logic, and experience. There was no doubt that God did not exist. He enjoyed the benefits of disbelief, not only intellectually but in social relationships it gave and the moral freedom it granted. He was quite happy as an atheist.  Jon was a convinced atheist with no intention towards changing. Yet today Jon’s passion is helping others discover the truth of Christianity, having completed an advanced degree in the study of worldview, and has worked full time in Christian ministry. It’s clear that a dramatic transformation has taken place. I hope you join in to hear his whole story, not only what informed his atheism but what breached those stalwart walls and prompted him to reconsider what he once thought so ignorant. What would cause someone so resolute to change his view about God? To move from an anti-theist, atheist position to becoming a passionate follower of Jesus Christ? I can’t wait to hear, and I hope you’ll come along.  Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jon. It’s great to have you on the podcast today.  Thank you so much, Jana, it’s great to be with you. I love the work that you’re doing and how you’re doing it, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a few weeks now. Fantastic! Fantastic! As we’re getting started, Jon, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, so we’ll know who’s telling this story?  Sure. So my story is probably typical, average. I grew up in a town south of Boston, Massachusetts, called Plymouth. The home of the pilgrims. To a pretty normal family. I grew up playing soccer and enjoying life in a suburb of Boston, and I just had a great childhood. I went to Plymouth North High School. When I graduated there, I moved to Washington, DC, and went to study criminal justice at American University. And I loved DC and living in our nation’s capital for, well the four years of college, but then after that, I got my first job, different than what I thought I was going to be doing. I ended up actually being a paralegal at a fairly prestigious law firm in DC, working on a lot of appellate work in front of the Supreme Court and having just a lot of fun in Washington, DC, and then I felt a pull to pull me out to California, so about 15 years ago now, I hopped on a plane and moved to sunny southern California, where I’ve been ever since, and I absolutely love where I live. I live in Newbury Park, California. It’s maybe about 45 miles north of Los Angeles and 8 miles from the coast, and this valley that I live in, it’s just the best place to raise a family. And I have a beautiful wife. Her name is Riana, and she’s my rock. I love her with all my heart. And then I have four amazing little girls, so I have Eva, who’s ten. Phoebe, who’s almost nine. I’ve got Joelle, who’s seven, and then I have little Annette, who is four. She just turned four last month. So, as with everybody right now, I’m just figuring out life and how to raise a family and lead during this time of uncertainty. Yeah. This is definitely a time of uncertainty. But yeah. Thank you for giving us a little introduction to who you are. I can tell, even though you’ve been in California for a while, you certainly haven’t lost that Massachusetts accent. I can hear that popping through from time to time.  As I get more comfortable—so when I get passionate, and by passionate, I mean animated, it comes out. And then also as I get more comfortable, the accent really starts coming out. So if you don’t understand what I’m saying, I’m really, really sorry. Oh, no! I think we can—you have a really great voice, too, so I think we can all understand what you’re saying.  So, Jon, you said you grew up in Massachusetts. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about the religious culture there. Was there much of one? And what did that look like?  Yeah. That’s a great question. I have a few friends back East who would claim to be religious, and when I say religious, I mean Catholic mostly, but it’s a cultural Catholicism. When I say that, I mean they don’t really go to Mass. They don’t worship God. It’s more of, you know, “My family is Catholic, so I’m Catholic.” And that probably describes maybe a third of my friends growing up. And then the other two thirds, I would say, are those which now we consider the “nones,” right? They have no religious affiliation whatsoever. My family in particular, we have Catholic roots going back three or four generations, but my family, we never practiced anything, really. And what that did is, in the cultural climate, it kind of allowed—well, a good thing is it allowed me to explore worldviews. It allowed me to explore my own convictions. However, the bad part of that is I wasn’t guided at all, and I became an atheist. By the time I was in high school, I was an atheist, and nobody ever really pushed back on my atheism. It was just normal. And that, I think, is indicative of the culture in the Northeast. I’m not saying that there aren’t any Christians there. There certainly are some really, really great churches that are doing awesome things, just none really where I grew up. One of the most interesting things, actually. In Plymouth, I was just back East maybe two months ago and walking around the hometown where I grew up and kind of reminiscing, and we have a lot of obviously old architecture in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the first church that was ever built sits up on top of this hill. It still stands today. I think it was built in the late 1600s, and it’s still there. And it was a vibrant church for 150 years or whatnot, but now it’s actually a Universal Unitarian Church. And that is actually kind of the story, I feel like, of the Northeast. It started out with deep roots in the Christian faith, but then, over time, it kind of just gave way to a relativism and an inclusivism, and so now I would say most people, that I know at least, in the Northeast, in my circle of friends, my influences, are not religious really at all. It was interesting growing up. Actually, my earliest memory of church—so, for some strange reason—and we never went to church, ever. We never talked about God in my family. I mean I literally have no recollection of the topic of God or Jesus. I actually had very little understanding of who God was, accurately at least, or who Jesus is, until I became a Christian. But my earliest recollection of religion growing up is actually, for some strange reason, my parents wanted me to get my first communion in the Catholic Church. Again, it’s a cultural thing. This is what you do. So they had me go to Sunday school, CCD, and I ended up getting kicked out of CCD. I was a challenging child, so my earliest memory is the Catholic priest of the church right down the street from my house kind of walking me out by the collar of my neck because I had done something. I don’t know what, but I definitely deserved this, I’m sure, and I remember my mom pulling around the church cul-de-sac in her blue Ford station wagon, the priest opening up the door, gently guiding me inside the car. And it was the summer, so I remember the window open, passenger side window, and him leaning in and just saying to my mom, “I’d appreciate it if you’d just never bring your son back here again.” Oh, my!  And it sticks in my mind, you know? I’m not going to relate that or put much weight on that led me to becoming an atheist or anything like that. It’s just an interesting commentary that that’s my earliest memory of really anything religious in my life, anything significant at least. So it was—I mean I’m sure I deserved it. I’ve always been a questioner. I’ve asked questions ad nauseam of just about anything, but—part of it was seeking. Part of it was just trying to stump people, even when I was—how old are you with a first communion? Maybe thirteen or something. So not even that old. But that’s my earliest memory. And it’s interesting, and why I bring it up is because it’s the cultural component. That we do this simply because this is what we do. There’s no real meaning behind it. So my parents were willing to allow me to become catechized, willing to expose me to Catholic doctrine and teaching, but there was no meaning behind it at all. And that, for a kid, I think, produces a lot of confusion. Especially if you really do start leaning into these things and you realize that there’s significance to what we believe. It matters. Ideas have consequences. So in one instance you’re getting taught one thing at home. My mom would always say, “You do you. I’ll do me,” or whenever I was trouble or something like that, it was all relativism. But yet on the weekends they had no problem sending me to Catholic training, ultimately, where—well, I guess relativism has seeped in there, too, but I remember them trying to argue with me against relativism at the time at least. I mean, this is now, oh, my gosh! Like thirty years. I bet that would cause a bit of confusion if you really tried to think about it with some clarity. But you said also in there that you had the tendency to question and also to challenge. As you were growing up, and I’m sure you were just fine in leaving catechism and CCD behind when you got kicked out, that it was just something you didn’t have to do, but as you were growing up and through those—you said your teenage years. You said around thirteen, fourteen. Did you have an opportunity to challenge anyone, any Christian or anyone with that kind of a worldview, a religious worldview, when you were pushing away from it? Did you have anyone in your world who represented what you would consider to be a Christian?  Yeah. That’s a great question. I’d say through high school, no. I really didn’t know. My best friend growing up, to this day, he considers himself Catholic. I don’t know when the last time he’s been to Mass was. I don’t think he is truly sold out on the worldview. He certainly believes God exists. I think he’d probably say a few meaningful things about who Jesus is, but I never pressed into anybody, and when I did, they never had answers for me. And then up through college is really where I started leaning into my atheism. And when I say that is I tried to live my atheism out consistently. And so whenever anybody brought something up from a distinctly religious perspective, whether that be Christianity, Islam, Buddhist, whatever it might be. I liked to press into them and lead them in a conversation, trying to see if they could defend the things that they say are true. And I had a lot of fun doing it, to be honest with you. But during specifically the high school years or my young adulthood, early years I should say, no. I didn’t really have anybody—nobody took their faith seriously in my life. I guess it’s just a symptom of where I grew up. Until I became a Christian, honestly… actually, until I met my wife, I should say. Until I met my wife here in California, I hadn’t ever really met a Christian who was walking the walk. I’d met people who were talking the talk but then very quickly as I—I’d love to take them out for a cup of coffee. Or my favorite place was going to the bar and buying them a beer and talking about religious things. And I would press into them pretty hard. And that, I think, is actually one of the—there’s two sad components to that in my mind. One is the people who claimed to be Christians. And some of them, I think, were Christians. I mean, I’m not saying that they weren’t. But they didn’t really have a rational justification for why they believed what they believed. And when I would press them, they’d say, “I believe this because the Bible says so and so.” And at the time, I’d say, “I don’t care what the Bible says. Why should I trust the Bible?” And that’s where the conversation started. They also never really tried to share the Gospel with me at all. Again, I didn’t hear the Gospel until I was in my mid-twenties and after I had been kind of put on this journey from atheism to Christianity. And that’s something I think is just really important and should be fundamental in our lives. We should know what the Gospel is. And we should be willing to share that. And I always, in hindsight, when I think back on my story, that nobody ever shared the Gospel with me is concerning. I’m curious. You made the comment that you tried to live your atheism consistently. You challenged others, perhaps at the college level, to defend what they believed to be true. Did you look deeply at your own atheism in terms of its own implications for your life, for reality?  Yeah. I mean absolutely. So in college, I studied criminal justice, which, in its very nature, lots of moral conversations come up. When you’re talking about theories of justice, systems of justice, the judicial system, where laws come from. And Constitutional Law is one of the classes I took in undergrad, and by default, these conversations that we were having in class were moral from the get-go, so when I had friends in class… There was one gentleman I remember. His name was Chris, and he was from Connecticut, and him and I were, I guess, the loud ones in the class. We liked to participate in conversations and discussions, and he was Christian. And he would bring up the idea that there’s an objective morality, for example, to base our laws in. Certain things are wrong, not because we say they’re wrong but because they’re wrong in and of themselves, objectively wrong. And I would press back at him on that and then say, “Well, no. No, no. It’s obvious we came up with these laws. I mean this is the law of the land. The Constitution was written by men.” And we’d go back and forth. So there was great dialogue in that, and as I got older and digging into these classes, I really started to lean into my atheism, meaning I tried to live consistently with my worldview, and I realized that, as I pressed into the world around me… I guess I realized a few things. First is there’s an objective nature to reality. Meaning we don’t construct our own reality out there. The world isn’t how we want it to be. And I tried to I guess justify that according to my atheism. If atheism is true, ultimately might makes right, and I’m a pretty big guy. I’m 6’3″, 250 pounds. I probably wasn’t that heavy in college. But I was still big. And I was bigger than a lot of kids. So I should just be able to take what I want, do what I want. And I started trying to really lean into that and live that out, and it led to some really dark places really quickly. Greg Koukl, when he talks about this—he’s my boss at Stand to Reason now. And he calls them bumps in the reality, and this would be the bump of morality. The bump of ouch. And when I leaned into my atheism, I was realizing that, no, there are certain right and wrongs out there, and they’re independent of my feelings towards them personally, which led me to have to come to the conclusion that there’s an objective moral depth, moral law to the way things are. And that’s not the only place where I bumped into reality. It’s throughout my whole story. I remember, in California, because of the weather out here, it’s just so beautiful. I’d stay out at night, and I’d just look up into the sky, and an atheist, I’m thinking, like, you know… But I remember distinctly one night, in my back yard. I was living in Hollywood, and I remember reclining with a bunch of friends. We’re in lawn chairs in the back and just relaxing. A beautiful California night. Staring up into the sky and wondering, “Why is it all here?” and then how, “How is it here?” All the beautiful things that I was seeing in that sky and even the creation, the world around me, how’d it get here? And that’s another bump into reality, the bump of stuff, you know? And I think maybe a lot of your listeners are familiar with the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, and I didn’t know that this was what I was thinking about at the time, but I was thinking, “Well, nothing comes from nothing, so that means everything had to come from something. And what is that something? I see the world around me. It’s not a mental construct. We’re not these brains in vats. There’s a physical reality out there that exists. Where’d it come from?” Because it couldn’t just pop into existence. That’s anti scientific. So it had to come from somewhere, and as I dug into that, I started realizing the best explanation for the physical nature, the physical world around us, was an uncreated Creator ultimately. An unembodied mind, a creative mind that is immensely powerful and that had creative depth, that wanted this to come. I didn’t know how else to justify that. And again, my atheism—I had no category for that. So on two fronts now, atheism, my atheism, which I was sticking to hard, was failing me. It wasn’t able to explain the world around me, reality, the way things really are. And then I remember also… I call it the bump of me. There’s a clear aspect to us that’s nonphysical. In hindsight, me and you, Jana, we’d call it our soul, but as an atheist, I had no category for the existence of my mind, for example. I remember really thinking about what love is and, as an atheist, really, “Well, what is love?” And I was trying to live out my atheism. And I had no place for love in my worldview. Because I would’ve said it’s not even a feeling. I would’ve said it’s a reaction that’s happening chemically in your brain that’s making certain… Neurons are firing to make you feel a certain way towards something, but that’s clearly not true, because, for example, I love my Mom no matter how I think about her at the moment. Whether I’m mad at her or sad or whatever. I clearly love her, so there’s something that’s happening in me that’s controlled by me, not a product of a naturalistic process in my brain. And then also introspection. How can I be introspective? How can I even think the thoughts that I’m thinking and process stuff? Why am I even struggling with these existential issues as I press into my atheism? Because according to atheism I shouldn’t be doing that. There’s no place for that in my worldview. And now, kind of getting back to your question about talking to people about this stuff. It wasn’t until I met my wife, really, in southern California. I actually met Riana my very first night in California. I was literally right off the plane. I was at a party, and she walked in. And from the very moment I met her, she just enamored me. I was just… oh my gosh! Like, “Who is this girl?”  And we got to know each other, and we started dating. I didn’t know she was a Christian for a while, and then she did something crazy. She asked me to go to church with her. And I’ve done crazier things, Jana, for the affections of a woman than go to church on Sunday with her. So I said, “Yeah, sure. I’ll go to this weird place with you,” and it was. It was strange. It was really weird. But it was really good, too. And it wasn’t until then that I actually met people who took their worldview seriously. Up until then I never got answers from people. Ever. And then finally now, and there’s a group of men there that I’m still close with. I haven’t been to that church now in about ten years. I’ve just moved on. But I’m still really close with the pastor and a couple of the men that took me under their wing, even as an atheist, and were willing to put up with my… I guess I should say put up with. They were willing to humor my questions, even though they didn’t necessarily have the answers. And they were willing to give of themselves, give their time and their patience and really walk with me and struggle through certain things with me. Kind of a side note is we started going to this church, and my wife… She’s always been Christian. She would say that she has always… she was raised to believe in God. And the Christian God. And even though she was maybe backslidden a little bit, she wasn’t living it out, she would say that she had a strong faith. And she wanted to get involved in the church, and she wanted to become a member of this church, so I went to the membership classes with her. Trying to get more ammo against the Christian. And part of the membership process at this church was to meet with the pastor and his wife, and we met with them together, and I went into this meeting. I’m looking back on it now. I was so conceited and arrogant is probably the right word. I went in there with notes. I mean, I had a stack… I’m putting my fingers out. It’s probably about an inch thick of carbon dating, questions on evolution, proving that the Bible isn’t what it claims to be. All these errors in the Bible. I had in my mind that I was going to go into this meeting, and I was going to de-convert this pastor, and that would’ve been a notch on my belt, you know? Because I’ve never talked to a Christian to this point that’s been able to defend their worldview to my liking, so how cool would it be if I de-converted a pastor? And we’re sitting there, and I asked all my questions, and it was really great. Pastor Dave is Dave Polus, so patient, and he answered a lot of my questions to my satisfaction. To a lot of them, he said, “I don’t know. That’s a really great question. I never thought about it.” And the best thing is just he was just honest and real. He wasn’t trying to blow smoke at me or convince me, really, of anything. He was there to listen to me, and he answered my questions to the best of his ability. And at the end of the meeting, they hugged my wife, Pastor Dave and his wife, Amy. They hugged Riana, and they said, “We’d love to have you as a member.” Because my wife was Christian, clearly. And then Dave takes my hand in his, and he shakes it, and he says, “You know what, Jon? We have enough members now. Thanks for coming in.” Because if he had offered me membership, I would’ve been like, “This is exactly what I think that this is. This is all a crock. You just want my butt in your seat, and you want my bucks in your coffer, and that’s all you care about, exactly what I thought of the church.” And he didn’t. He said, “You know what? Keep coming around, but you can’t be a member here,” and I really respected that. And then the best part of this is that he, as he’s shaking my hand, he pulled a book off of the bookshelf, an apologetics book, and I’d never heard of the word apologetics in my entire life, and he gave it to me, and he said, “You know what? Some of the answers that you’re looking for, some of the answers to the questions that you’ve been asking that I couldn’t answer, I think they might be in this book.” And I took the book home and I read it probably a dozen times, and for the first time, I was getting intellectual answers, respectable answers to the deep questions that I had, and now you combine that with the soul searching I’ve been doing. I’ve been realizing that, as I was trying to live my atheism out in reality, I kept bumping into reality in those areas, and then you combined this—okay, now there’s intellectual answers out there, and that led me to another book and then another book and then another book. And then also right at that same time—God is just so good. Right at that same time, my future in-laws, they gave me my first Bible. They gave me a New Believer’s Bible. It’s the NLT, the New Living Translation. It’s, I think, edited by Greg Laurie, and it has cool commentary. Very simple. You know, “Who is Jesus?” “Who is Satan?” “Who is God?” “What’s the Trinity?” And these cornerstones of faith is what they call it in there. And I read that cover to cover over the span of three months. So I was being ministered to through just the nature of reality, trying to press into my worldview, seeing that the world is a certain way and my worldview wasn’t able to explain that. I was being ministered to by these Christian apologists who wrote phenomenal books that just put their ideas out there for people like me to struggle and wrestle with. And then I was also being ministered to by the word of God, and then that’s really—so my mind and my body were being ministered to, reality and the intellect, and now my soul was being ministered to through the word of God, and it was in that direct encounter really with the word of God, as I sat on my morning and afternoon train to and from work and read Genesis to Revelation, when I put the Bible down after interacting with it, struggling and wrestling with it, I had to draw the conclusion that God is the Christian God, and more specifically, Jesus is who He claimed to be. And that was a turning place for me. It led me into a deep study of the resurrection and trying to see if my naturalism, if my atheism could explain the facts surrounding the resurrection. And after that study, and I remember sitting on my couch, and I had the… This is when I relented. I was sitting on my couch, struggling with—you have all this evidence centered around specifically the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus. There’s these core pieces. Habermas now says maybe there’s 18 agreed-upon facts centered around the resurrection of Jesus. And when I say that, it means there were 18 pieces of history, events in history that are believed to have happened regardless of our worldview, so Christians believe that these things happened, Muslims believe these things happened, atheists believe these things happened. One would be an empty tomb, which is a more recent one. Or Jesus’s crucifixion. He died on the cross. That’s what happened. We generally believe that Jesus actually died on the cross. His disciples had what they experienced or described as an experience with the risen Jesus. He was dead. He was buried. And then the disciples said they interacted with Him again alive. But these things, people across the worldview spectrum believe happened, so these are pieces of evidence for the resurrection. Now I have to put those—this is the way I thought, at least, at the time. “I have to take these pieces of evidence, these building blocks, and I need to come up with a hypothesis that explains them cohesively and together, not independent of one another.” And I remember sitting on this couch, and thought that went through my mind, Jana, was—this is really what I thought. And this is the turning point for me. “Maybe aliens came down and did something crazy futuristic to the body of Jesus, so that he got brought back to life.” And then I remember thinking, “If I’m willing to posit aliens and not God, I have a serious intellectual problem going on.” And right then and there, I said, “I’m cooked,” and then, as I’m saying this, the hairs are standing up on my arms because it was such a turning time, a turning place in my life. Everything changed for me. Everything. My focus of life and how I was living shifting dramatically. And I haven’t looked back since. I’ve just caught fire. And it’s just so cool even now, just talking about that it. That was a really long answer to your very short question. No, no. You know, what strikes me as you’re telling your story is that you—what I really appreciate really is that you were an intellectually driven atheist, honest about your worldview, pursuing whether or not it was true as related to the reality and the evidence that you were finding. You continued pursuing in light of the fact that you had some push back, some bumps in reality, but you were still trying to justify your atheism, but you were becoming open enough to consider another perspective. I think that that openness and your intellectual honesty is to be really praised, because I think we live in a time and a place where we have a tendency to just hold onto our worldview at any cost, no matter what other viewpoints may say or even what reality might say. We become so insular in our own perspectives that we’re not willing to even consider another point of view. It sounds like you went on a journey but you were willing to consider the evidence as it came. And I think that’s huge.  And that’s true even today, right? I don’t believe what I believe because it makes me feel good or because it’s—it certainly hasn’t made me any more money. I mean I was making really good money. I was having a ball, so it’s not like I’m having a better life now than I’m a Christian. I don’t believe for those reasons. It didn’t make me popular or gain me any type of fame or anything like this. I believe what I believe because it’s true. And I’ve always felt that way. And this is one of the pieces… I teach a class called Discipleship at a local small Christian high school, and as I’m discipling these boys, these seniors… Just yesterday, I was telling them our main goal in life is the pursuit of truth. We don’t ever want to believe anything that’s not true. And I was like that as an atheist, and I’m like that as a Christian. And my mind is still open. I would love to talk to anybody. If you think Christianity is false, then give me the case as to why it’s false and why your explanation of reality, your reasons to believe the world is a certain way, something that explains the world around us is better. If you want to explain that to me and prove that to me, I’m open to it. Because certainly if Christianity isn’t true, I don’t want to believe it. If Jesus hasn’t been raised from the dead… I mean this is scripture, right? So Paul says if Jesus hasn’t been raised from the dead, then we’re to be pitied above all men. Right.  Not only that, but we’re still dead in our sins. And I might as well… If Christianity isn’t true, I might as well go back to my atheistic living, my hedonism, pursuit of my own pleasures, than living this life I live now. So I believe what I believe because it’s true. And that’s what I’ve always felt. Truth has been paramount to me my entire life. Nobody likes being lied to. Nobody likes getting the wool pulled over their eyes. Why would that be any different with our worldview? We should apply that to our worldviews. And so we should all be digging into… Whoever your listening audience is, you should be digging into your worldview. You should be pressing at it. Even the Christian. Don’t ever get complacent in what your worldview has to offer. Don’t ever just take it for granted. Dig into it. Test all things, holding fast to that which is true is what the Bible says. This isn’t a blind faith. It never has been for me. There’s too much riding on it. Right. No, absolutely. Now you obviously, again, went through quite a journey of looking at truth, looking at reality, reading books, reading the Bible, and you came to a place, particularly, I guess, after considering the resurrection, that it was true. You came to a belief or an intellectual assent in the truth and reality of the Christian worldview. But, as you and I know, there’s more to it than intellectual belief. And you mentioned earlier something about the Gospel, that Christians had never told you about the Gospel. And I’m wondering how the Gospel played—what it is, first of all. How did you come to learn it? Was it through reading the Bible? Because you said you read it cover to cover on your train ride. And so I’m wondering how you put the pieces together between your intellectual assent and giving your life to someone?  Yeah. So part of my pursuit of my atheism, one of the things that became very clear to me is that the world isn’t as it ought to be. One of the common experiences we all share, and when I say we all, I mean every person who’s ever lived on this planet shares the understanding that something is deeply wrong with the world. Whether it be a political issue, whether it be a family issue, an issue with friends or an issue with your job, the world around us screams out that it’s not as it ought to be. And if there’s a way that it’s not as it ought to be, that means there was a way that it ought to be. And that led me into just a pursuit of, “Okay, how ought it be?” and that’s really where we find the start of the Gospel. And this experience that we’re talking about today, this is why I think, ultimately why the Christian worldview is true. It’s because of the Gospel. The Gospel is simply the good news of what God has done through and in Jesus Christ. And it finds its beginning in a perfect creation. Everything was created perfect and right. God, at the end of His creation days, looked at it, and He stepped back, and He said, “It’s good.” He created man and woman, and He said they are very good. And everything was as it was. But then something went wrong. A problem got introduced to the reality of the world. And that is sin. Eve had an interaction with the serpent and believed the lies. Did God really say? You know? And that’s something that we all struggle with. We all want… ultimately, we want to be our own kind of god. When I was little, I used to say, “I’m the boss of my own self,” you know? And that’s how we want to live life, and that was what happened with Eve. “Did God really say you can’t eat of that tree? He’s just trying to hold you back,” is what he said to her. And then she believed him and took of the fruit and ate and gave to her husband, to Adam, and he ate, and from that moment on, sin has entered the world, causing everything to kind of go awry. And that’s why things ain’t as it ought to be. But the cool thing about the Gospel is, unlike any other worldview that’s out there, there’s a solution in the Gospel. There’s a solution in Christianity to the fundamental problem that we all experience. And that solution is that Jesus bore our sins on the cross. He bore the penalty. He turned aside God’s judgment, God’s wrath from us as payment for our sins. He took these things on, the brokenness of our lives, and then through that action, through the crucifixion, we’re restored. That shattered relationship with God. So you see, when we fell into sin, the main problem—yes, the world isn’t as it ought to be. Yes, we harm and sin against each other. But the main issue that we sin against God. We break that relationship that we once had, that was once had with Adam and Eve that was perfect. And that shattered relationship, Jesus, He rebuilds it in the context of the crucifixion and the resurrection, and then that’s now played out in the existence of the church. There’s a new life that we human beings, we find in Christ, and it’s granted out of the sheer grace of God. It’s not received by anything that we do. There’s nothing that we can do to earn God’s favor. It’s a free gift as we repent of our sins and turn to Jesus. We confess Him as the Lord, and then we bow to Him joyfully as we come to realize these things. So the Gospel is the good news, and it’s the good news of what God has done in Jesus, by taking the fundamental problem of reality, that there’s something wrong with the world, and completely restoring it. Now, it’s not completely restored yet. We’re still waiting for the consummation, the final product, but it’s also something—just because it’s not here completely doesn’t mean we can’t experience it now, and I’ve experienced that in my life. As I took a deep look at the person that I was and the person I was becoming to be as I was chasing the morality that was granted to me through my atheism and then realizing that I was the problem! The problem wasn’t out there, like I used to think. As I started digging into my worldview, I realized that I was the problem. And it’s a personal problem and it needs a personal solution, but the solution, while it’s personal, is completely outside of us. Because I don’t have the capability to fix the problem. And it has to come from something else. And that’s where it came from. That’s the good news, the Gospel. That’s the Gospel, is that the solution to my personal problem comes through the Person, the life, and the work of Jesus Christ. As He lived the perfect life, the life that you and I, Jana—we should be living that perfect life, but we can’t because of sin. As He went to the cross and died that perfect death, the perfect death that you and I, that we, everybody listening, that we deserved to die because of our sin, paying a price that you and I, we can’t afford. There’s not enough money in existence or ever been in existence to pay that debt. But Jesus paid it on that cross. And then it doesn’t stop there as He died and was buried in the tomb. The best part of the good news is three days later—He didn’t lie dead, and this is really what separates Jesus from any other God out there. He didn’t remain dead. He walked again. Three days later, He rose from the dead. He was raised by his Father, by God the Father, and in so doing we find the promise that all long for. Everlasting life, complete healing. Every tear will be dried. Every disease and infirmity will be cured. Because of that resurrection, we’re guaranteed a promise of eternal life with God the Father and his beautiful Son, empowered by the Holy Spirit to live perfect, sinless lives in glory. And that’s when Jesus comes back and ushers in the new creation, obviously. But that’s the Gospel, the good news. The solution to the universal problem that we all experience, that we all know that’s out there. And I don’t know any other worldview that offers a more robust, accurate solution. It’s awesome. Wow! It sounds like you’re convinced you found reality, and that reality is in the Person of Jesus.  That’s right. It’s amazing! Yeah. It’s incredible! Now you mentioned that everything changed in your life after you accepted this truth, not only for all of reality but for yourself personally. How did things change in your life? How are you experiencing this good news as applied to you personally? How is your atheistic life different from what you’re experiencing now?  That’s a really, really good question, Jana. Wow. So there’s practical things. From what I choose to do and what I choose not to do. And I want to be kind of clear here. Before I was a Christian, when I was an atheist, I used to think Christians were boring. I didn’t want to be a Christian because I thought I’d have to be ruled by this Sky Daddy who was basically just sitting up in the sky waiting for me to do something wrong so he could punish me. And that’s so far from the truth. So when I say that my behavior has changed very practically, like practical living changed. How I spend my money, how I spend my time certainly. The relationships I chose to keep and the relationships that I chose to get rid of because they were extremely unhealthy. Not that they weren’t fun. They were unhealthy. So things like that changed, but it wasn’t because I was scared of a God that was waiting to send bolts of lightning down to punish me. My desires, my wants, and my focus shifted out of a reverence and a respect, as opposed to a fear of punishment. So obviously, as an atheist, I didn’t try to live my life according to the standards of Jesus. I tried to live my life according to my own standards, completely subjective. And there is some overlap there. I think I tried my best to love other people to the best of my understanding and knowledge of what love is, but it wasn’t until I became a Christian that I understand that we’re told, all people, we’re told to love God and love people. That’s the great commandment. So as I became a Christian, I tried to align my life very practically into how Jesus has told me to live my life. Certain behaviors had to stop. I used to drink a lot. I used to love to party and go out and have “fun.” That was my life. That had to stop clearly, and it’s not because… Again, it’s not this… I’m fearful of people listening who maybe don’t share my worldview or our worldview, Jana, thinking what I used to think, that this is your typical Christian who isn’t doing stuff because he’s fearful of punishment. I live and stand firm in the grace of God. There’s nothing that can separate you—if you’re a Christian, there is nothing that can separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. There is now no condemnation in Jesus. That’s what the Bible tells us. So I don’t refrain from my sinful activity, and I don’t refrain from going out and drinking and having extramarital affairs because I’m worried about God’s judgment or punishment on me. I’m refraining from those things because I now want to honor God in all that I do, whether I eat, sleep, or drink, do all unto the glory of God, is what the Bible tells us. And that’s where my focus has shifted. And that’s where the dramatic shift comes in. I’m no longer the master of my own ship. I have a new Master, and He’s a good Master. And I know that He wants not only the best for my life… He not only wants me to have the best life now, but he also wants me to have the best life for ever and ever and ever. So my focus completely shifted off of pursuing my own desires to pursuing the desires of the One who created me, my Heavenly Father. I now get to serve God with every aspect of my being. And no comparison on a naturalistic perspective. That’s an incredibly transformed perspective. Loves and living. That’s amazing. Jon, as we’re coming to a close, I know that there are probably some skeptics out there. Perhaps they’re curious enough, as you were, to explore the evidence and to go where the evidence leads, and I wondered if you could speak or give advice to someone who perhaps is where you once were as an atheist.  Yeah. Absolutely. Press in to your worldview. Don’t take the common answers at face value. When somebody teaches you something or you hear something… In hindsight, Jana, when I’m thinking about my atheism, when I was an atheist, I carried with me all the atheistic slogans. I used what I would call the nail in God’s coffin, my argument from the problem of evil. I had a surface level understanding of the problem of evil, but then when I started digging into it, I actually realized that it’s not just… I mean, it is a problem for the Christians. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a problem for everybody, though. It was my problem, too. And when you get outside of yourself, you’ve got to kind of step back and be intellectually honest and say, “This is a problem for the Christian. What about my solution? And which one’s better here?” So pursue your own worldview to where it leads, and then not only that, but then, if you’re listening to this and you’re an atheist, live it out. Try to live it out in a consistent fashion. I have a really, really wonderful friend, and she claims to be a relativist. And she says that. She says, “No, I believe relativism is true. We make our own system of rights and wrongs.” Well, I leaned into her about that and said, “Well, how is that even possible?” There’s one political candidate that she just can’t stand, and I said, “But you’re rejecting this person on moral values, but those are just that person’s moral values, and those are up to him to make.” And so there’s this check there, and she actually was honest enough to say, “You know what? You might be right.” Now, that’s not an argument to convince her of the Christian worldview. I’m just saying let’s be consistent with our worldviews. Which worldview is most consistent with reality? Lean into it. Don’t take people’s words for it. Those atheistic slogans I used to carry with me. When I started actually really trying to dig into them and see what the meaning was behind them and where they came from, when I started reading deeply about evolution and where we came from, the solutions didn’t satisfy. So in one aspect, the answers are in your own worldview. If your worldview can’t give you the answers to certain fundamental things of reality. If they can’t answer the fundamental questions of reality, meaning, purpose, origins, destiny, morality, then you might want to consider a different worldview. And how well does that worldview line up with reality? And so that’s what I’d say is dig in to your questions. And that goes for the Christian, too. Don’t ever be satisfied with answers that don’t satisfy. Right.  One of my recommendations is, when I read scripture, and this is for Christian and non-Christian alike. If you’re going to dig into the scriptures, and I highly recommend that you do, start with the Gospel of Mark. It’s really quick. You can read it in three or four days. But don’t just power read it. Christian and non-Christian alike, read it, and when you come to a place that’s like, “What? What are you talking about? What’s this mean?” Stop and actually think about it. What does this mean? “What’s this? Let’s wrestle with this.” Don’t ever take your worldview for granted. Lean into it. Press into it. I said, earlier on, that there’s consequences. Ideas have consequences, and the consequences are dire. There is nothing more important to think about than the nature of reality and whether or not God exists. Because how you answer that question is going to dictate how you live practically your entire life. And especially as you seek to live out your life. Does your worldview explain the things that you’re trying to live out? So dig in, press in. And that’s the other thing, is don’t ever give up. Don’t take unsatisfying answers as gospel truth. Dig in, press in, don’t ever give up. And enjoy the process. No, no. That’s great. That’s great. And finally, if you wanted to just turn and talk to the Christian in terms of how they can best engage with those who don’t believe, perhaps the way they live their lives. You know, in a nutshell, in a moment, can you give a word of advice to the Christian?  Two things. One is be confident because we have a very powerful ally on our side, and that is reality. Reality, and when I say reality I mean the way things really are, is on our side. So we don’t ever need to shy away from any topic. We don’t ever need to worry about pressing into any issue. It all falls back on the fact that we don’t want to believe things that are false. We just don’t. So if it’s false, I want to know, and we need to lead with that perspective. We need to dig into the hard issues and with the understanding that reality is actually on our side. I think atheists especially, or certain other worldviews, come across as intellectually robust or maybe they have more answers, and it’s just not true. Christianity, in recent times, I feel like has gotten away from an intellectual stance. We were seen as… Christians are oftentimes seen as anti intellectual, and there’s nothing further from the truth. And the second piece goes along on this, on the coattails of this, read. If you’re a Christian, I hear it all the time as a pastor and as an apologist, “I don’t like to read.” Well, you’ve got to learn to like to read. Read widely. Read people you disagree with often. Read ancient works. Read the church fathers. And most importantly, read your Bibles. Every day, read your Bibles. Start memorizing, committing scripture to your mind. And you’ll see amazing things happen, and you’ll see confidence come through. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Some of us, the worst fear that we have is that we’ll talk to somebody and they’ll know more than us. I think that’s fantastic because it’s an opportunity for me personally, if this happens to me, I get a free education. I get to sit and ask some strategic questions to somebody and say, “Wow! You obviously know way more about this than me.” This happened to me with a friend. He’s a marine biologist. He has his PhD from MIT. I mean this guy is brilliant. And I didn’t know that when I started the conversation. And very quickly, I realized, as we were talking about evolution. Very quickly, I realized I was so far out of my depth with this man. I was like, “He’s playing a different sport,” and he was schooling me. But I don’t have a problem with that. Because, again, I don’t want to believe something that’s false, so instead of trying to prove my point, I’d just sit there and ask him, “Well, tell me. Tell me all about this. Why am I wrong? And where am I wrong? Show me and prove it. What can I be reading so I know more?” And one of the ways that we can learn how to converse really, really well is reading Koukl’s book. I don’t know if you’ve read it, Jana. The tactics book? Yes.  It’s phenomenal. And the tactics in that book help give us the confidence that we need to go into a conversation. So the first thing is we have reality on our side. We don’t need to be scared of anything pressing in. Christian worldview best explains the way the world really is. Second thing is read and read often and widely. Read people you don’t believe or trust. Read people that you don’t agree with. Read old stuff. Especially church fathers and things like this. And read your Bibles. And then also read Koukl, I guess. Yes. Yes.  Yeah. And don’t be afraid to press in and don’t be afraid to not have the answers. Nobody has all the answers. That’s why we’re not God. Yeah. I think that’s really excellent advice, and if I could add one more Greg Koukl book to your advice to reading Tactics, I would say his recent book called The Story of Reality. If you’re a Christian or even not. That really, in a very accessible way, speaks to everything you’ve been talking about in terms of what we experience in our life and in the world and how the Christian worldview is the best explanation for reality.  Yeah. Having listened to you, I’m also equally… not only inspired by your story but also very challenged, as someone, as anyone should be listening to your story, to really not take whatever worldview you have for granted but actually be an open pursuer of truth and after truth. Whatever that is, because it will lead you where you need to go, and if you’re pursuing truth with an openness like you have, even if you began like you did, in an effort to disprove, you were still open enough to not shut down anything that conflicted with your own worldview. You were open to receive it and to question it and to challenge it. And it led to where you are. So I think we can all take, again, a kind of inspiration from all of that, from what we’ve heard today, and move from this conversation and be re-inspired towards seeking in a very intentional way what it is that we believe, why we believe it, and does it match with reality.  So thank you for bringing that to us today, Jon. I really, really appreciate it.  Well, thank you, Jana. And thank you again for all the work that you’re doing in putting this podcast out there. I’m such a supporter of what you’re trying to get done, and I think the work is incredible, so you’re leading the way. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you.  Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jon’s story today. You can find out more about where he works at the Stand to Reason ministry and the books that he recommended by Greg Koukl in the episode notes of this podcast. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll subscribe, 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 be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.   

Like his father, Justo Amato was a resolved atheist well into middle age yet he unexpectedly came to believe in God. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who unexpectedly became a Christian. It’s often thought that religious people are religious just because they grew up that way. They don’t know any different, so they just believe, and it is thought that, once they discover the truth about religion, they will no longer believe.But what happens when someone grows up in an atheist household, resolutely identifies as an atheist until middle age, and then comes to believe that religion, particularly Christianity, is true? When someone has been an atheist for most of their lives, later into middle age, the odds of such a dramatic life shift from nonbelief to belief is often surprising, both to the person who’s making such a tremendous paradigm shift, as well as those around them. Those who are resolute in their own worldview often don’t seem to change, but sometimes they do, and we are generally curious as to how that happens. Today, we’ll be listening to Justo Amato’s long journey from atheism to Christianity. Following in the footsteps of his own atheistic father, it wasn’t until his late 50s that Justo reconsidered his own beliefs. I hope that you join in to hear his story, not only to understand why he was an atheist for so long, but what changed to allow him to reconsider what he once thought impossible to believe. This should be interesting. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Justo, it’s so great to have you. Thank you, Jana. It’s great to be here. Wonderful, wonderful! As we’re getting started, Justo, why don’t you give us an idea of a little bit about who you are? Okay. First thing, I was a little 4-month-old immigrant from Spain, so as a little boy, I don’t think I spoke any English until I went to kindergarten. Neither of my parents spoke English. My father spoke a little bit. My mother spoke none. And so my brother and I grew up speaking Spanish and English back and forth, always speaking English to one another but Spanish to my parents, and- Your family. That’s fascinating. Your family moved over from Spain, so you were immigrants to the US. What part of the US did you grow up in? Well, we settled in Bound Brook, New Jersey, and that’s where I lived up until I was 44. Okay, so you grew up in the Northeast. I did. Yes. So what was that like, growing up in the Northeast in terms of both your family and your community? Was there a sense of religiosity? Was there a community of faith? Catholicism, I believe, is probably fairly strong in the Northeast. What was your world like growing up? Was there God in it? No. My father was an atheist. As a young man in Spain, he saw the priests living very well while the community was struggling, and so he just became totally anti-church. So I never heard even the mention of God or Jesus, never saw a Bible. Most of my friends in my neighborhood were Catholic. One of my good friends was an altar boy. Why he was an altar boy, I’ll never figure out, because he was the wildest kid. But anyway, nobody that I knew really went to church on a regular basis. They went Christmas, New Year’s, for communion, but there were really no strong religious people in the neighborhood at all, and so I had no religious training, background, nothing, and it was that way until I was 28 years old. And then I went to the beach, and I met Annabel. During that period of time, those 28 years, that’s a long time to really consider who you are and your beliefs and what you believe and what you don’t believe. I guess you considered yourself an atheist during that time? And if so, what did you think of Christians and Christianity and belief in God. What was that to you? Was that just something people did on Christmas, Easter, but there wasn’t much more to it than that? How did you consider or what did you think of religion and religious beliefs during that time? To be honest with you, I didn’t give it much thought because my friends, they never brought up religion at all. I mean I had friends, six or seven friends. Nobody ever talked about religion. So I never even gave it much thought, Jana. And now I meet this young lady. She was 20. I was 28. And it turns out she teaches Sunday school, and she was at the beach with her friend, who was also a Sunday school teacher, so for the first time, I’m hearing about God and Jesus. I went to church with Annabel a few times before we got married, and I didn’t have a problem with going to church, but I didn’t really give myself to anything. I just went and was an observer. So you weren’t antagonistic towards religious faith. No. I was never antagonistic because when I asked Annabel to marry me, and she told me, “I’m going to bring up our children, if we’re lucky enough to have any, I’m going to bring them up as Christians.” I had no problem with that. But on the other hand — I had no problem with it, but I wasn’t ready to accept Jesus, either. Right. So you, as a good husband and father, went through the motions of church going in order to do something with your family, I guess? Is that correct? Right. Yeah. Initially, I wouldn’t go. Annabel would take the children, and then Christopher, when he was five years old, said to me, “Dad, how come you don’t go to church with us?” And I didn’t have a good answer, so I said, “Well, okay, fine. I’ll start going with you.” And I started to go with her. And that’s when I met the associate minister at this church that we were going to, and he was such a fine man. So I’m curious. As someone who had never gone to church, all of your life had really very little exposure to it, what were your first thoughts when you went to church? Not knowing exactly what that was. Well, the first thing that impacted me was this associate minister. He was such a fine man, and I thought to myself, “Wow! This is what a Christian is like, being like this man?” I was impressed. I thought the world of him. But I still wasn’t ready to accept Jesus. What was it about his lived Christian life that was impressive to you? Well, he was so kind and so gentle, and he would give Annabel such fine advice about — like she would say, “If you were confronted with a bull, would you wave a red flag in front of a bull? So when you’re dealing with your son, don’t antagonize him. Just be calm.” Anyway, he was very, very helpful to Annabel. So it sounds like he gave wise counsel. He did. Yeah. So as you were sitting there in those church services, and they were singing songs about God and Jesus or teachings from the Bible, what did you think about all that? In terms of did you think there was any truth to it at all? Or did you think that the Bible was just stories, and they were singing to a nonexistent God? I mean, as an atheist, how would you consider those things? Honestly, I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. I just thought, “This is what Annabel wants to do. The kids are benefiting from this, so I’m on board.” But I didn’t see it applying to me, if that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah. So you didn’t see it applying to you because, as an atheist, there’s a sense of autonomy and independence and that you don’t need that kind of thing in your life. Is that how you were considering it? Yes. So in your mind, were Christians someone who were a bit more needy, I guess you could say, or weak, or needed that crutch, or something like that? But it just wasn’t for you? That’s about right. That’s about right. But you went through the motions of going to church. How long did you participate with this view? I guess you started going- I did. For about 13 years. We lived in New Jersey for the first 13 years we were married, and then I lost my job, and I was looking for a job, and it turned out that the job was in Florida, so, in 1978, I started the job in April of ’78. And Annabel and the kids stayed in New Jersey until August. We were having a house built, and the kids were finishing school. So you moved down to Florida, and you moved the family down to Florida, and I’m curious, too, all this time that you are participating or going through the motions of church for the sake of your family, was Annabel — I’m just thinking for the sake of those who are married to people who don’t believe in the same way. Did she ever talk with you about, “Why don’t you believe?” or put pressure on you, or was she just fairly quiet and just appreciative of you coming? How did that work out? She never put any pressure on me at all. I guess she felt that, in time — in fact, the associate minister had told her, “Don’t push him. He’ll come around to it when he’s ready. You’re not going to help anything by putting pressure on him,” and so she took his advice. And I’m sure you appreciated that. I did. Yeah, yeah. So now we’re in Florida, and we had a couple across the street that was attending a non-denominational church that they were very pleased with, and they invited us to go with them. And we did. And so now we started going to this church, and again, I was going every Sunday. I was going to different events. But I was just going through the motions. Right. I wasn’t really prepared to accept Jesus. I didn’t see a need for it. And then they had home fellowship groups, and this very good friend of ours, the wife, kept putting a little pressure on me. “Why don’t you come to these meetings? Come! You’re going to love it!” And so I did. I started going to those. Now, I started meeting men that I had a lot of respect for, and I started thinking, “Gee. These guys, they believe. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get over this resistance that I have that goes all the way back to when I was a child and never heard of Jesus, never heard of God, never read a Bible, never saw a Bible?” And so now I began studying in the Bible a little bit, and that went on for a few years, and then one day—we would go to church regularly. It was a Good Friday, and Elizabeth happened to be here. She was in grad school, but she was here, and so Annabel, Elizabeth, and I went to church on a Good Friday, and we met another couple that we were friends with, and they had communion. And I had never taken communion because I felt, “I’m not a Christian. I’m not a believer. I should not take communion,” but all of a sudden I just felt an urge. “I should take communion,” and I did. And Annabel almost fainted. Elizabeth put her hand on our friend who was sitting next to her, and she said, “I can’t believe what I just saw my dad do! I can’t believe it!” Yes. Well, yeah. I’m sure it was a bit surprising. That was the moment that I accepted Jesus. And I still can’t explain why then, why that particular night, but that’s when it happened, and then I began to really become a Christian, to participate in home Bible studies and to work in the children’s ministry and to do things, so that was the evening that I accepted Jesus. And I think it was 1992, I think it was. Let’s see. Yeah, I think it was about 1992. So it took me a long time. Right, right, yeah. But there was probably something in—I’m sure, years of consideration, sitting through a lot of church services and sermons and then meeting—it sounds like you met a lot of Christian men who embodied a life that you respected, which I think it sounded surprising, but- One of the biggest impacts on me was my son. My son, Chris. Now, as a young man, he was a little bit wild, and he got into drinking and I didn’t even know the extent that he was drinking at the age of 16 or 17, and his friends, they were not a good influence. My son would say to me, “You don’t like my friends, do you, Dad?” And my response was, “It’s not that I don’t like your friends. I don’t like the influence that they have on you and the things that you do when you’re together. You’ll do things that you would never do on your own. Now, he went to graduate school at Emory, and he met some really fine men, and without mentioning any names, he had a wonderful influence about him. He had an accountability partner, and all of a sudden, I saw this transition in my son, going from this kind of wild guy who drinks too much for his age, who might be in danger of becoming an alcoholic, to a really fine—you know, a Christian. And that had a big influence on me as well. That transition that I saw in Chris, that had a huge influence on me, in addition to the home study groups that I was involved in, but seeing that change in Chris had a huge impact on me. What was it that was so impactful? Was it the fact that you just watched his life being transformed into the Christian life and then it was attractive to you? Yes. All of a sudden I saw—you know, here’s a guy. He was drinking way more than I thought he should drink. He was doing things that I didn’t think he should be doing. And now, he’s surrounded by wonderful young men. His focus is different. I just saw a transition from a wild guy to a strong Christian, a strong believer. Wow. Yeah, it’s amazing to see a life transformed like that, especially when it’s your own child whom you love, and you know who they are. They’re not hiding anything from you. You just know them as a parent, and to see that kind of life transformation must have been amazing. Right. Yeah. I actually know your son, and he’s a wonderful man, so you and Annabel have done an amazing job with both of your children. Elizabeth and Chris both are just—I can’t say enough about them. They’re amazing, amazing people. When it comes to Good Friday and the message of Good Friday, I’m sure that there was something quite compelling. The gospel of Jesus, knowing that there’s acceptance and forgiveness no matter what you’ve done. I’m sure that that was something that you felt or—was there anything particular? Good Friday, for those who are listening who may not know what that is, Good Friday is actually the day designated when Christ was crucified on the cross, where Christians come together and remember that, and what He did on their behalf, that is, taking on the sin of the world. So that we don’t have to earn our acceptance with God. Right. Rather, God paid for our sin. And it’s a really amazing thing when you realize or take that in personally, and there must’ve been something about the message of that evening and understanding what communion is. Communion is really remembering what Christ did for you, basically, as a sacrament. Right. Yeah. So I’m sure there must’ve been something there for you that evening, kind of a culmination of many, many years of taking very small steps, but nevertheless, you were taking steps forward. It sounds like even though you were resistant for many years in your life, you continued to find yourself taking steps forward. And then the next thing you know, you find yourself actually believing this Person of Jesus. I guess it happened over, like you say, a long period of time. Right. No. It was a gradual, very gradual, process for me. And all this time, my father—my mother died in ’79, and my father started coming to visit us every January, February, March, roughly those two, three months. He was still an atheist, and as far as I know, he was an atheist the day he died. So he never—my father was a really kind man. He was very good to both my brother and I. He was a good husband. But he was never, never a believer. And yet he had a niece who was a nun. She became a nun at 15, and he loved this woman. After my mother died, he would go to Rome and spend two, three months with her. He went to Spain and spent time with her there. I got to know her really well. She loved Annabel, even though Annabel didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and she didn’t speak hardly any English at all. They really loved one another, and they had a connection, and the connection was Jesus. The nun, she believed in Jesus. That was their focal point that drew them together. Wow! That is interesting, considering your father had been really put off or rejected the church because of perhaps what he had seen as a child, the negative things that he saw, what the priests and what they were doing as compared to the people and all of that. It seems, though, that his niece, as a nun, gave him a different picture of, perhaps, who Jesus is through her life, and I’m glad to hear that. Sometimes people can get the wrong impression from an institution or a person who represents Christ or Christianity but not really understanding the real person of Christ himself, and I hope that your niece gave him that. Right. Yeah. So wow, what a story! So how old were you then, when you accepted Christ in your life? Let’s see. I came to Florida at 44. I was probably around 50, early 50s. Yeah. That’s quite a long time to go in your life, where you actually kind of change in midstream, to go from nonbelief to belief, but that’s a wonderful story. It’s a wonderful story, and so it sounds like your life—you’ve been convinced of it since, right? I have. You’ve held onto it. You took a long time to get there, but it’s something that you obviously have become convinced of and believe in. I have. Yeah. I presume, through continued Bible study and whatnot, you’ve really embraced it as your own, as true and real, and that Jesus is a Person worth knowing. Absolutely. Yeah. So as we’re just thinking further about this, knowing what you know, since you went for such a long time as a nonbeliever, I wonder—there were probably things that you appreciated or that you didn’t appreciate in terms of Christians approaching you or—like you say, Annabel was very patient and didn’t push Christianity upon you or anything, and you had those wonderful examples of men that you respected who were Christians. What would you advise Christians as to how they could best engage with those who don’t believe in Jesus? I would imagine having patience is one of those things. Yeah. I think the most important thing is not what you say but how you live your life. Because people are watching you. And in some cases, they’ll know you’re a Christian not because you said you were a Christian but because of the way you treat them, that you show kindness. I’ll give you an example. We had this security gate with guards, and this one day, I drove in, and I would always speak to the guard. Always. I’d always speak to him. I’d ask him how he was doing, how his family was, and he said to me, “You know, I think you’re a Christian.” And I said, “Really? Why?” And he said, “Because you take the time to talk to me. You don’t just drive through the gate and ignore me.” And he said, “I’ve noticed the same thing about your wife.” In fact, there was a lady guard that worked there, and Annabel befriended her. She would watch her daughters for her. And they became really good friends. And she said the same thing. “It’s how you treat me. It’s how you speak to me.” So I’m convinced that, if you want to bring somebody to Christ, then you need to show them, in your life, what Christianity means. And it’s not so much preaching as it is the way you live your life. And how you treat them. How you make them feel. Yes. Yes. Valued. You don’t just drive through the gate and ignore him because he’s a guard. He’s a human being, and he’s got a family, and he’s got interests, and so if you stop and talk to him and just be a friend, it’s going to impact him. Yeah. It’s amazing what an impact or difference just small things can do, just small gestures that are really huge sometimes to other people, valuing others. Yeah. That’s pretty wonderful. For those who might be quite skeptical of the Christian faith, of Christianity, of belief in God, have rejected it for whatever reason, but might be curious, just as you were, I guess, curious on some level. What would you say to someone like that? I think I would say, just observe Christians, and I think, for the most part, you’re going to find that they’re kind, they’re accepting, they’re loving. You might want to consider that this is something worth doing. I mean not only your soul, but I think it’s just a wonderful lifestyle. Aside from the fact that you’re saving your soul. Well, those are two very big things, having a life that—as Jesus says, a life that is truly life, a life that’s abundant in so many ways, knowing that you’re fully known and yet fully loved. Amazing things that you can find within Christianity. I can imagine some skeptics out saying, “Well, that’s not the Christians I know.” Right. Yeah. And that sometimes can be a really difficult issue. Just like your father encountered a priest who didn’t fit what he thought Jesus was about. And so I think sometimes—I think our witness can be good, in terms of when we do live the Christian life and allow Christ to live in and through us, but unfortunately sometimes we don’t always live as we should, and sometimes looking past the Christian life towards Jesus is the best way to really consider Christianity, because He was perfect. The only one, right? But yes, but Christians can make a difference, especially if they are truly embodied Christians and are living faithfully in the way that they should and loving, as you say, in the way that they should. It is a very attractive thing to do. So thank you so much, Justo, for telling your story. It sounds like it was a long walk, you know? One step at a time over a period of years, but I think what I appreciate most about you is that you were willing to, in a way, sacrifice and surrender your own purposes for the sake of your family just to go and that you respected and honored your family, even though you didn’t believe. And it’s amazing to me to see how even placing yourself with a willingness to place yourself in a situation that may have been uncomfortable, that you didn’t agree with, but over time, you became willing to actually see Christianity and to see Jesus for who He is and Christianity for what it was and that it was something worth believing. So in my research, I’ve seen—this sense of the will and whether or not someone is strongly resistant no matter what or whether or not they’re actually willing to give it a chance, and I think, in your story, you allowed the truth of Christ and the Person of Christ to come through on His own terms over time into your heart and mind. And I’m so thankful, because obviously you have left a legacy with your children and no doubt grandchildren at that point. So thank you again, Justo, for telling your story, and I really, really appreciate it. Thank you, Jana, for the opportunity. You’re so welcome. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Justo’s story. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next podcast, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.

Former skeptic Sue Warnke wanted nothing to do with religion. Although she achieved business and personal success, something was still missing from her life. Her quest for meaning led her to reconsider God. Episode Resources Sue Warnke’s blog – www.leanership.org Sue’s recommended article for skeptics – “Five Steps to God” (by Sue on her blog) Faithforce is the Interfaith employee resource group at Salesforce Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis 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 a skeptic but who unexpectedly became a Christian, to learn from their perspectives both as someone who resisted God and then as someone who not only found God but is also follower of Jesus.   Achievement and success often drive us.  Unmoored to God, skeptics are often believe they can take life by storm and find its fullness and fulfillment on their own.  There’s no need for God.  As poet William Ernest Henley penned, I am ‘the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” Sometimes after reaching the summit of personal or professional success, and the best of what the world has to offer, we’re often left with a sense of emptiness after the temporary glory recedes, wondering is this all there is? In my research with former atheists, While many reported a positive sense of satisfaction within atheism prior to conversion, slightly more than half (27/50; 54.0%) (Q15) ‘did not find Atheism to be generally satisfying but soberly accepted it as truth.’   This begs the question, are they willing to ask the deeper question – is this all that life has to offer?  It is in this moment of existential reflection, a decision is made to keep on or to search for something different, something more.  Someone may become open to that which was completely walled off before, or not. That is part of our story today.  Sue found the height of success in Silicon Valley and a wonderful family life, but somehow it didn’t ultimately satisfy her soul.  It set her on a journey of searching for something more. I hope you join in to hear her whole story – not only what informed her skepticism, but what allowed her to reconsider what he once thought so irrelevant.  This should be interesting! Welcome to the podcast, Sue. it’s so great to have you here today. Thank you. It’s great to be here. As we’re getting started, so the listeners know a little bit about you, why don’t you tell me a bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps what you do? Yeah, so I live here in northern California, a little town called Pacifica, on the beach. I have a wonderful husband who surfs, which is why we’re out here by the beach, and three teenagers. One is a sophomore in college, the other is a senior in high school, and then the other is a sophomore in high school. I work at Sales Force. I’m a senior director of content experience, so basically documentation and videos. And I kind of grew up in Utah and Colorado. Wonderful. So you grew up, in, you said Utah and Colorado. Let’s start back there. Tell me a little bit about your childhood. Also, not only where you grew up, but your family, your community, your friends. Was there any sense of God or religion in your growing up years? So I grew up in a town called Layton, Utah, which at the time was 95% LDS, Latter Day Saints, or also known as Mormon. And we were not that. My parents were Christian, and at the time, I have this vague memory of going to a children’s church meeting, but we kind of walked away from that. They had a falling out with that church pretty early on, so I have a vague memory, but then we were pretty much agnostic. Tried a few different churches throughout that time, but the key was that we were not LDS in this very LDS environment. So the impact of that is two things: One is that I was an outsider. I really couldn’t do all of the events with all the other kids. They would talk about things like their Ward, and I just wasn’t part of that. And then also my family and myself in particular was the target of evangelism. Pretty hard core evangelism. Pretty interesting attempts at evangelism. It felt at times like the whole town wanted to convert my family. So I developed this huge wall against religion of all types and just decided that was not for me. I wanted nothing to do with it. If that was the impact of it, of making me feel like an outsider and making me feel pressured, then I didn’t want anything to do with it, and I kind of developed this… I was pretty much anti religious, I would say. I mean I was that friend in college that was sending articles disproving this and that to my friends of faith and having deep, long discussions about how illogical it was and irrational it was, and I really felt like I didn’t need that in my life. So these walls that you built towards religion, that persisted, it sounds like, all through your childhood. Even when your parents were nominally Christian or whatever, there was no faith on your part. There was no real belief on your part. And then you just became averse to any sort of religion. I can’t imagine feeling like such an outsider in a such a religiously dominated world of which you were not a part and they were aggressively pursuing you. What that must have felt like. I mean if you resisted it to a point of antipathy. You wanted nothing to do with it. What would that feel that? I guess that informed your understanding of who God must be, right? Yeah. And I definitely don’t want to demonize that environment, because they were also incredibly loving. I mean one of the kindest environments you can ever imagine is just about anywhere in Utah. So I look back very fondly and have many friends who are LDS, back then and now. So definitely not in any way trying to paint it in too negative of a light. But there were a few moments. I know once I got invited to what I thought was just a snowmobiling weekend with some friends, and it turned out that it was that, but it was also a chance to sort of get me a little bit isolated, and both the kids and parents kind of surrounding me in an attempt to convert me. So it was quite odd and pretty traumatizing. I think I was maybe 10. So yeah, I built that wall, and then the repeated attempts of my mom to get me to go to church, and I found it so boring. My sister and I would just write notes about how horrible it was to each other. I really did think this was just irrational and quite unpleasant. So obviously it wasn’t worthy of belief and not logical, rational. So what did you think belief in God and Christianity was for? Whether it was protestant Christianity or LDS? What did you think religion was if it wasn’t true for you? I just thought it was a crutch. I thought, “Well, that’s nice for you, that you need that little pick-me-up to keep you going, and you can pretend that there’s something bigger than this world. And then I also thought it was just superstition. I had a friend who wasn’t really very Christian, but she would say things, “I just felt something. I felt a presence,” or, “Sometimes I feel like somebody’s here,” and I would just kind of internally laugh. I mean, there was a lot of arrogance in me all these years, like, “Okay, you can go on and think that.” I wouldn’t call myself an atheist. I wouldn’t say I said there’s no God. I just would simply say, “Nobody knows. Nobody knows. It doesn’t really impact my life terribly. I’m going to focus on driving my own future.” Just the captain of your own ship? Yeah. So it sounds like you did encounter some people who were Christians growing up. It just didn’t sound like something you wanted to be a part of. Yeah. In fact, my parents… Because the public school was so heavily LDS, they pulled me out, and they put me in a Catholic school for high school. Oh, okay. And that also was pretty negative experience. I remember we had to take religion class, and it was led by a priest, and we were supposed to journal about what we were learning about, and in my journal, I would ask questions, like, “I’m not so sure about this,” and, “I wonder about that,” and I’ll never forget, when he was returning our journals. It was kind of a U-shaped classroom, maybe about twenty students, and he threw mine across the tables, and he said, “See me after class.” And I was terrified. And I was very much a people pleaser, so that was really shocking. And embarrassing. And afterwards, he said, “Don’t ever question my authority.” So I was quite, in some ways, traumatized by Catholicism and by the more Christian angle of things as well. Had very few positive experiences related to that. So that makes sense to me, so that when you actually went to university, it was something that you wanted to fight against, or you said argue with or- Mm-hm. … or whatnot. That it was not something that was even an option for you. Oh, absolutely not an option, and I was quite angry about it and wanted to debate and sort of fight the whole notion of it. I’m curious. When you wanted to fight the whole notion of it and you ran into Christians in university, did anyone have any kind of rational, logical, evidential answer? Anything solid or substantive to come back against… Were you even open to listening what a Christian had to say? I don’t know that I was actually open, but I had wonderful examples of Christians in my life. I really did. I dated a man for three years who was devoutly Christian and tried so hard to get me to convert. Even had his father call me and try to convince me. And I worked with really amazing people as well. None of that really softened my heart. I mean, it just didn’t penetrate at all. I didn’t hate Christians, certainly, and I didn’t think that these people were illogical, but I just felt like, “Well, that’s fine that you need that.” I accepted that, but it in no way got me to change my mind. Really nothing that they said. So it was just a psychological crutch. Something for people to have a sense of belonging perhaps. Or maybe they were just raised that way, and so of course they would think that way. So a little bit of maybe even brainwashing. We’re all brainwashed in some way. We’re all products of our environment, so of course they would be, too. So that was what I thought. Okay. So that kind of perception of religion and Christianity and belief in God, how long did that persist? You said you went through college, and you started in the business world. I presume your agnosticism continued, and tell me about that part of your life, when you- I mean, my entire career, my entire life, I was perfectly fine without God and really did not pursue it in any way, met my husband. We have three wonderful kids. And for Christmas, we thought, “Yeah, it’d be good to teach them about Jesus,” just kind of informationally. This person existed and this is what people believe about him. Very lightly, you know? And then immediately taught them nobody really knows the truth, and so explore things as you wish. We didn’t want to create a pushy environment for them, where they couldn’t ask questions, and where there was only one right way, and that was really important to us. And I think we did raise kids that questioned and that hopefully don’t feel pressured by us, but I never personally pursued religion in any way during that period, other than just saying, “Yeah, maybe. Who knows?” Not making a big deal of it. Okay. And during that time, too, you were achieving quite a bit of success in your own personal or business career, weren’t you? Yeah. I have been very blessed. I put it that way now. As opposed to ‘I was doing so great.’ But I had wonderful parents that supported me, and I had the opportunity and privilege to get an education and a graduate education and have always worked hard, so that can get you pretty far. And I started a PhD program in English and then found there’s no real market for that field, but luckily, you could translate that into tech, so I got a job in tech writing, which was really satisfying and very marketable. I did that for two different companies for about 14 years and then, after that, landed at Sales Force as a technical writer and then moved on to management, and that’s kind of where I am. Now I lead multiple teams of writers and engineers documenting our products. So really satisfying, super exciting career journey. Very fulfilling. And on the side, wonderful husband and friends, so I wasn’t feeling this huge gap. I wasn’t hitting rock bottom. Things were pretty good. So if things were going so well without God or any of that, any crutch, and you were achieving all of these wonderful things, and you had a terrific life and family and career, what caused you to stop and think or wonder or change course? What was going on? Yeah. So I think I did have to hit rock bottom in some way, so while things were going well, at some point in my career, I started to just feel dissatisfied. I thought, “Okay, I have everything, and I mean literally in a tower.” In San Francisco, we have these enormous Sales Force towers, and I’d be looking out, thinking, “I’ve got a great team, great family, great job. Why am dissatisfied? What is wrong?” And so I had kind of a void in my life, and I could not put my finger on it, and so I figured, “Well, it must be my job. Maybe I’m supposed to do something more meaningful.” So what is it that changed for you? If you had the good life, what is it that made you perhaps stop and think that maybe God is worth thinking about? Well, I definitely never considered it. It really had to kind of push itself into my life pretty aggressively. So the way it all happened is I had this great life, but I was still starting to feel dissatisfied for some vague reason. I would look around and think, “I’ve got everything, so why am I feeling kind of dissatisfied?” And so I figured it must be my job. Maybe I’m supposed to something more meaningful than technical writing with my job. Maybe I’m supposed to make this big impact on the world or help people, you know? I had this desire for more meaning. And so I quit my job and pursued a new role that was kind of on the surface more meaningful. It was leadership development. Teaching managers across these Fortune 500 companies how to be ethical and humane and kind and follow best practices. And it was really exciting. I was traveling around the world making this impact. Managers would come up to me… One manager said, “This changed my life!” And I thought, “Wow! That’s got to fill that void,” you know? And I tried to push it in there, and it didn’t fill the void. And so that was really scary. Like, “This is not solving that need. Well, what is that need?” And then a couple of things happened that really made this kind of a high priority, this pursuit of meaning, and one is that this job was not what I thought it was. It wasn’t just teaching. It was also selling these classes, and it turns out I’m terrible at sales, so I was just falling flat on my face. I’d never failed before, in life really, you know? A straight-A student and career progression. And that was shocking. I think I sold $7,000 out of a $700,000 quota. Like one percent, you know? Everything kept failing. I’d get close to a huge deal, and it would fall apart. So that was really devastating to my identity. Because I was a business success, you know? And that evaporated. And then on the home front, so I have a son with special needs, and those needs were just starting to show themselves right about this time, and so health wise, all sorts of problems were happening with him, and we just were not able to find the help that we needed. Everything was like a shut door, so my identity as a businessperson and as a mother were collapsing. I was not a great mother, helping my ill child. I was not a great businessperson. So who was I? I was like nothing! And I was very depressed about that. I remember I was in a hotel room on one of these business trips, and I said, out loud—and I certainly did not think of it is a prayer, and I was not in any way intentionally talking to God, but I just said, “Wow! I give up. I don’t know what to do!” like, “I cannot fix this.” And I just had never said that before, had never said that out loud, and of course, now I see that as a prayer, as the white flag, and after is when God just came into my life in these really systematic ways. Wow! Wow! So that was a major turn of events. So you were praying even though you really didn’t know it was a prayer. It was that point of, I guess, laying whatever you held of yourself down and saying, “I can’t do this anymore.” Yeah. Some point of surrender, but you it wasn’t real clear at that point, I’m sure, what you were surrendering to or to whom. Yep. But things changed. So tell me about that. Yeah! So very weird set of things started to happen right after that. I mean just immediately. I woke up the next day, and I flew home, and I remember I had this huge desire to listen to Christian music, which I had never wanted to listen to before. In fact, I used to mock, and I used to say, “This is so cheesy,” and I didn’t even know how to find it, but I just went to Spotify. This urge was so great. And I typed God, and up came this really beautiful music. And I just found it enthralling. I mean I could not stop listening to this. It just was kind of filling me up in some strange way. I was kind of embarrassed. I didn’t want my family to know. I would listen on headphones and things. So that was one. And then shortly after that I was reading through some medical material for my son, and weirdly, in this medical article, there was a paragraph about God. And it didn’t fit. And it was talking about how belief in God can be as healing or more healing than any kind of medication. And it was saying we are surrounded by a world created by God, and that was weirdly appealing and filling me up as well. And what it made me do is picture somebody in my head from my past. Clear as day, I thought of my kids’ old karate teacher, who I knew.  He had invited me to church once. And I turned him down. But I remember I used to sit in the back of the karate studio and watch how he trained the kids. No matter how good or bad they were. No matter how old or young they were. Even the parents would take his class with him. He loved them. He loved them for who they were, and just was like this funnel of love in a way that I had never seen before, and he was who popped to mind, and I thought, “Oh, yeah! He invited me to church,” and I somehow got the courage to text him. I had his number. And I said, “Long time no chat,” and, “Can I go to church with you?” And he said no. No, I’m just kidding. Of course! And then that was a really kind of big moment for me. I bet he was shocked. Yeah. He was shocked. Out of the blue! Yeah. I didn’t even tell my husband that I was going through all of this. It was all just kind of keeping it inside at this point. So then you went to church with him. For the first time as an adult. Curious, I presume. Yeah. I had taken my middle daughter had expressed curiosity once, and I had taken her to a couple of churches, I think. Just trying to allow her to question and everything. But yeah. For the first time on my own volition, I went to church, and it was this tiny little church in my town of Pacifica, and I walked in, and it was a pretty transformative experience. And at the very end… And I remember crying. For some reason, I was in the back, crying, and at the very end, these two people went under this big cross, and they said, if anybody wants prayer, we’ll be right here, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” So something gave me the courage to go up to them. I’d never asked for prayer or been prayed over in my life, and I just said, “Can you pray for me?” And they put their arms around me and said this beautiful prayer, and I was crying, you know? And I just thought, “Wow! There is something real happening here.” And that made a really big impression. I was very confused, but I kind of drove home in tears and dried my tears and just thought, “I don’t really know what’s going on here,” but that was a big step. That would be a big step. From someone who was rather agnostic and really resistant to God for so long, and then you surrendered in some way and became open, and then somehow He shows up. You feel, in a sense, a palpable reality that there is something more than you had thought before. Yes. Absolutely. So I guess at that point you were very open to exploring whatever this was. Tell me about that. So I was kind of sitting with all of this, and I was going on a business trip, another business trip, so while I was there, I was unpacking my things, and I got a text from this karate teacher. And I was still in the wrong job and still unable to fix the situation with my son’s health, and this text said, “Sue, I pray that the Holy Spirit will reveal Himself to you today.” How did you feel about that? Did you understand that language? Did that seem kind of weird? I can’t imagine. You know, I did not understand it, but I felt it. I understood the feeling of it. I understood that this man took time out of his day to send me a prayer, to send me something quite bold. I mean it makes me almost want to tear up now. I sat on the bed just holding my phone, like holding this prayer, like this was just pure love in my hands, you know? Unsolicited love. And I will never forget that. How powerful that felt. Even though I didn’t understand it. And so I sat there and just kind of meditated on it, and it was only about 30 minutes later I get a phone call, and I’m thinking, “Okay, what’s this about?” And it’s my Aunt Jean in Texas, who, of course, would not have had any contact with this karate teacher, and she sounded really nervous, and she said, “Sue, this is going to sound weird, but I’m supposed to call you right now, and I’m supposed to tell you about God.” Wow. And of course I thought, “Oh, my gosh!” I just got this text from the karate teacher almost preparing me for this call. I feel to my soul that God heard the karate teacher’s prayer and really compelled my aunt to call me. Because we had never talked about religion before. I mean I knew she was a Christian, but I had no interest in it my whole life, so it was quite bold for her to call me, and I said, “What made you call me?” And she said, “Well, when Missy died…” Missy was her daughter who had died of an aneurysm long ago, and she said, “I felt the same urge to call her, this urge from God to call her, and I didn’t, and I always regretted it, because that night… Maybe I could’ve called her before the aneurysm. Maybe I could have told her I loved her.” And so she said, “I vowed that if I ever got that feeling again, I would obey it, and I had that feeling tonight. I’m supposed to call you. It’s very powerful.” And she didn’t preach and she didn’t lecture. She just told me what it meant to have God in her life and to be able to pray. And she told me stories. She told me two to three stories of God showing up in her life and lifting burdens and transforming things, and it was so beautiful. I was absolutely in the presence of something. And I had a decision at the end of it. What am I going to do with this? Is this the wildest coincidence, or is it real? So I was at that moment as the call was ending. Yeah, I would imagine you would… As she’s speaking about God showing up in her life, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t be thinking, “Is God showing up in my life right now?” Right. Yeah. It couldn’t be coincidence. Thirty minutes from the text. And it had been years since she had felt that urge, and then it’s all on you. Yeah. It would be hard not to think that, in C.S. Lewis’s terms, the hounds of heaven are kind of focused on you at that moment and that you felt that in some way. How did you respond to this focused personal attention from God? Well, I had to decide in my head, is this really God? Because that whole thirty minutes was really a decision point. Before, it was like, “Wow, this is weird.” Now it’s like, “Wow! I think God might very well be real,” you know? “Oh, my God!” And I’ll never forget that kind of decision, because it’s like a door opening to a universe. It’s like you realizing what you thought of as the universe was actually like a room, and opening the door and seeing there’s an entire world out there. There’s an entire existence. There’s an entire way of thinking and living and being. There’s a God. There is a God. There is God, the God! And all of that, I just couldn’t deny it anymore. I couldn’t deny what had happened, like physically. These things did happen. I have the text. I even snapshotted on my phone the time that Aunt Jean called. I wanted this evidence. These things happened. And I can’t deny that. And then I can’t deny how I feel, which is just what it felt like. My mom passed away a long time ago. We were best friend. She had cancer. And it felt like I was being held by her. That’s what it felt like, is being in the arms of someone that loves you more than anything else. That’s very profound, very powerful language you’re using. I decided I would verbalize that before we hung up, and I just said, “I believe you,” which was a big step, actually really saying I believe in God. I think it’s true. And we hung up. And real. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a major turn for you. I imagine that your husband was a bit surprised. Your children were surprised. Tell me about that. Yeah. Well, I’ll tell kind of the next phase first, which was still I had to process all of that. So I remember after we kind of hung up, I fell to the floor really and just sobbed for, like, three hours, really thinking back on a whole life of taking credit for the blessings that I had been given, taking credit and knowing, like, the whole time God was there. The whole time He was doing it for me. And how unappreciative I felt. And how just really sorry I felt. And I remember trying to pray, and words wouldn’t come out, and then finally, once I went through all of that, I realized what my prayer would be. My first real prayer to God was, “I’m sorry.” And I could verbalize that. And it was like instant forgiveness. Instant load off my shoulders, instant euphoria, almost. And I texted the karate teacher back, and I said, “You’re not going to be what just happened.” And he said, “Praise God. Get a Bible and read John.” So I found a Bible, and that kind of started this journey, and I went back home after that, and I stumbled back in this church, and I told the pastor and a couple of others, like, “How do you give your life to Jesus?” And he said, “Let’s talk about it. Let’s pray,” and we just said a really messy prayer, and I feel like I had already converted in a way in the hotel room, but that was nice to verbalize and to say, “I give my life to Jesus, to following Jesus.” And so yeah, then how do I integrate that back into my life? I’m really careful about not talking about my family in public, just to protect their privacy, but I can just share real vaguely that definitely it was shocking to have your mom come home as a born-again Christian. I say that proudly. I’m a born-again Christian. Even though I know that carries a lot of negative connotation, and I would’ve never thought I would ever say that. That’s pretty shocking to your family. But we had lots of really good conversations, and it turned out to be just a wonderful thing for all of us, and I now tell my story, like here, and they’re very, very proud of me for all of this growth and change. Yes, I would imagine so, and how wonderful to have that kind of support. Calling yourself a born-again Christian, that does carry with it a lot of preconceived notions and connotations. Yep. I imagine, working in northern California, Silicon Valley. How is that received as a successful businesswoman in northern California in the business place, in the workplace. How is being a born-again Christian taken? I would imagine that would have challenges of its own. Yeah. So that was an interesting part of all of this. I feel like it was only a few weeks after I converted, or maybe a few months, that I got an offer to come back to Sales Force, so I feel like that was a gift from God and that I was there and not just for myself, not just to make me happy, but to bring faith, to make it safe to have a faith in the workplace. And so I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I was really clear that that was part of the reason I was coming back there, is to be a leader of this movement within the workplace, and so I was very scared. I didn’t even want to wear my cross at first or tell people about it. I was really scared. I remember I started by wearing… it was like a flower cross, so it almost didn’t look like a cross, you know? And I would wear it to one meeting, and I’d think, “Okay. Well, nothing bad happened. Nobody mocked me. Nobody yelled at me. Maybe I can wear it to two meetings,” and then I’d eventually wear it all day, and then made it a real cross, and as I was testing the waters there, too, I also was searching for people that were professing anything related to faith, maybe like in their signature on their email. I noticed somebody had a Bible verse. And I noticed someone else had posted something about faith. And so I kind of found them, and we started a quick little Bible study, a prayer group, and it grew. It grew from two to five to now it’s hundreds of people all around the world. Very quickly. But then that wasn’t the whole story. That’s great, to have that and have a safe place to pray and talk about your faith in the workplace, and most companies are kind of growingly having things like that, but that wasn’t still a kind of top-down initiative. So that’s another thing I focused on is, “How do we have faith be recognized as a legitimate form of identity?” For some people, their faith is their number one identifier, over their gender or race or cultural background. And so what about those folks? When we say, “Can you bring your full, authentic self to work?” If that’s your number one identifier, you should be able to. In fact, that should be celebrated. As long as you’re not pushing it on others, you shouldn’t have to hide it. In fact, that will lead you to probably leave if you can’t express that side of you. So we worked with the leaders and formed Faith Force, which is an official employee resource group at Sales Force, and it’s hugely popular. That’s fantastic. Very bold and I think innovative and really courageous in this moment. I like the way that you say that, is that identity. The [number marker?] typically in Christianity is that that’s who you are and your primary identifier as a follower of Christ, and all of those other things are secondary to that. In thinking about your story, thinking way back, when you criticized belief in God and Christianity as irrational and illogical, as a crutch, I can imagine the skeptic listening to your story and saying, “Oh, she just kind of had a powerful experience of God. She’s now one of those who needs God as a crutch,” and you’re an intelligent woman and a thinker and very rational, so how did you fuse those two things together in terms of justification for the things that you believe? Yeah. Well, I started studying in great depth, found some really trusted mentors to kind of help me through that, and what I found was good data. What I found was… Almost nobody describe that Jesus existed. Very few people deny that. Or deny that He was crucified. Nobody denies that He had followers, that He had these apostles that kind of spread His message all around the world. There’s enough evidence of that that is historical, not necessarily written by other Christians. And we know that Christ got crucified, so obviously it was very risky to express this kind of belief in Jesus, and they did go into hiding after he was crucified. They went into hiding, were scared for their lives, and then something happened. When Christ resurrected. Something happened the size of a resurrection. Nothing else can explain it that would lead to the entire world changing, that would lead to these apostles not only not hiding but risking their lives and most of them dying to tell people what happened. To tell them, “He came back to life! I saw it! That means what He said is true. That means He’s the Son of God, the one and only Son of God. I saw it! I witnessed it. I experienced it. I experienced these miracles,” and enough people back then professed that to their death that it changed the entire course of history, and they wouldn’t have done that for a lie. They wouldn’t have all universally said this lie that He came back to life if it wasn’t true. There would be no benefit to them to do that. And so that, to me, is the sticking point here. Did He live? Yeah. Did He call himself God? Yeah. Did He come back to life after death? Well, it sure seems that that is true. And if that’s true, then what He said was true, what He said about being the Son of God is true. And that’s something we have to reconcile. That’s something that we should think about. Well, what does that mean? If it’s true, that changes everything. Yeah. It sounds like you did due diligence to really look at the rational evidence for your belief. You knew that God was real, and you wanted to substantiate the truth of what you felt and experienced with God, and I appreciate that about you. It is almost mind, heart, and obviously your life coming together all at once. Now you said there was a moment where you had, it sounded like, everything the world had to offer, but yet, you were dissatisfied, that somehow all of your achievements and your success didn’t fill up something in your soul. And I’m wondering, after belief, and you found God, has that sense of emptiness been filled? That sense of dissatisfaction moved to satisfaction or abundance. Did it make a difference? Yeah. I mean absolutely it has, but I wouldn’t say that it’s a miracle cure-all, in the sense that life is still super hard. My son’s medical concerns only got worse. They’re very severe. And so every day we deal with that. And there’s no clear solution. And it’ll be a battle for the rest of his life. And yet I don’t feel alone in that battle. So I take walks with my dog, and especially when there’s a lot of unknowns, and I just feel like, “Okay.” I pray every day, and I say, “Okay, I think this is what I own,” and I listen. Like, “Is that what I own? Okay, that’s what I own.” And it’s not God telling me, but it’s a clear feeling, like, “Okay, this is what I’m supposed to do today. Please help me with that thing.” Maybe it’s an appointment with a doctor. That’s what my focus is, and I do need to step forward into that. And then the reminder, “I’ve got the rest.” And I’m like, “Yeah. You’ve got it, God. You carry the entire weight of this thing. You carry the future of my son, of me, of my entire family. You own it. You own all of it. And I’m going to do this one baby step today.” And that’s so much more manageable than thinking, “What am I going to do next week?” “What am I going to do next year?” “What if this happens to him?” “What about when I die? Who’s going to take care of him?” I don’t worry about all of that anymore. I honestly don’t. Like, “God, what do I do today? That? Okay. I can do that.” And it changes everything. I mean it is just like having just your best friend, your best parent, your best coach, just telling you, “I’ve got it. You do this. I do that.” Teamwork, you know? Especially, I’m thinking, looking at the world today, there’s just so much fear. Yes! And so much, I guess, sensed need for power, among many, wherever you go. And so what I hear you saying is that you really have a peace that you didn’t have before and a sense of… really peace whether it’s in this life or what’s to come. And I would imagine that would inform everything about your life. Yeah. It’s very manageable. That’s what I would say. Sort of no matter what happens, and I really mean that. I think the worst tragedy ever… I feel like I could manage it because I don’t have to fix it. I don’t have to lead it. And I don’t have to carry it. I can carry my part. And it is a great sense of peace. And it takes work, too. I mean I have to carve out that time in the morning to look back, and I think God for what He’s done for me the day before and acknowledge Him, and I go through the Lord’s Prayer, and then I look at my day ahead, and I say, “What am I supposed to do today?” And it’s usually one thing. And then I ask Him to help several people in my life, and He does, and I go into my day. And it is every single day like that. And it is now quite… Just peaceful. Yeah, it sounds like it’s driven by both peace and purpose. Yeah. And purposes that are not only in your world but beyond yourself and purposes for the world, especially with what you’ve done with regard to prayer and bringing forth faith in the workplace in such a substantive way. You’re to be applauded for that. I think that takes immense boldness and courage, and you are obviously a woman who possesses those things. So as we are coming to a close, I wondered if… Picture your former self. Just angry, just resistant at God, no need for God. Perhaps somebody is just the least bit curious, though, and you could be somehow that karate teacher in someone’s life or just based upon your own journey, what would you tell a curious skeptic? I would totally empathize with them first, because I think a lot of Christians, when they’re trying to convert others or they’re trying to persuade others, go about it so poorly. And that was my experience on the other side of things, so that’s the last thing I would ever want to do is pressure somebody, so really just empathizing. At least my reasons, I get why to be skeptical. I think it’s perfect legitimate. I’m surrounded by people who are legitimately skeptical. They’re not crazy. You’re not a heathen. You’re not all these terrible words that I think you might be depicted as. It’s awesome that you question. It’s awesome that you push back. This is so great. That’s what God wants of all of us, you know? And if you’re ever interested, I’m here for you. That’s what I would say. The worst thing you can do is pressure somebody. Definitely from the perspective of the Christian who is trying to be the best follower of Jesus that you can be. Don’t be ashamed of your faith. Own it. Wear it proudly in the sense of never show shame for being a follower of Jesus. He’s a wonderful Person to follow and the Son of God and that’s one thing. And the other thing is just be loving and encouraging, and at the right time, people will ask you questions. Don’t be afraid to bring it up in the sense of, “What’s your faith background?” “How did you grow up?” “What are your thoughts about faith?” And really listen and care but don’t manipulate. Don’t pressure. That isn’t your role whatsoever, and it’s not reflective of Jesus. So I would just tell the skeptic, “I totally get it, and that’s awesome that you question.” Yeah. Because truth is not afraid of being questioned, right? Yeah. Jesus can take it. Yep, yep, absolutely. Is there anything else you want to add to your wonderful story before we end here, Sue? Any thoughts or anything you think that we’ve missed? I would end with Revelation. One of my favorite passages in there, “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anybody opens the door, I will come in and dine with you, and you with me.” So I just want the whole world to know that scripture, that God is waiting. He’s been there the whole time. He’ll be there the whole time, and He will come in as soon as you open the door, as soon as you say, “Okay, I give up. I actually can’t solve this whole life thing on my own. I don’t know, but I guess I need God. I guess I’m open to God.” Then He will come in. He will come in, and he will be there with you forever. So that’s my wish. Well, you are certainly a living, embodied testimony of that verse coming to life. And I’m so grateful to you, Sue, for telling your story. It is a beautiful story, an amazing character arc, you know? Moving from complete disbelief to just an amazingly beautiful ambassador for belief in God and Jesus and Christianity and the life that it can bring you. And I also appreciate your honesty with all of that. It’s not all roses. It is a journey. It’s a daily struggle. But just like you said, there is someone who’s greater who’s in control who loves you, who is with you and for you and has purposes for you, and in Him you have peace. Yeah. So with that, again, thank you, Sue, so much for joining me today. Thank you. All right. Here we go. I’m going to- Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Sue’s story.  You can find out more about her, her blog, her work with Faith Force at her website: www.leanership.org.  I’ll include this along with some of her recommended resources in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at theSideBPodcast@cslewisinstitute.org If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this new podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time where we’ll be see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Former atheist Jeff Dockman wanted nothing to do with religion. Over time, his presumptions about the world, and his place in it, ceased to make sense and he began to consider the possibility of God.   The CS Lewis Institute: www.cslewisinstitute.org   Jeff’s recommended authors and books: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis, Miracles Alvin Plantinga   Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side to see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone’s who’s been an atheist and became a Christian. Through listening to their story, we can appreciate both sides from someone who’s been there. If you believe in God, you can see how someone might dismiss the ideas of God, religion, and Christianity. If you don’t believe in God, perhaps you can see how someone who once resisted God moves towards belief. But as for all of us, what we believe in affects our understanding of who we are, our identity. In fact, our identity can be shaped by many things. How we see ourselves, how others see us, what we do, the group we’re a part of, who we want to be, or how we feel. Our identity can be shaped by our friends, our family, our life experiences, our desires. For atheists, there is a sense of freedom in creating your own identity without restraint. Free thinkers who form their own identity, their sense of self. Sometimes our identity can also be shaped by knowing who you don’t want to be, a soft anti-identity. We don’t want to be a part of a group of people that seems culturally irrelevant, judgmental, unscientific, hypocritical, uneducated, weak, narrow minded. Pick your adjective. These are terms often used for the religious. We want our identity to be as far from that as possible. That is where our story begins today but not where it ends. The sense of rejection of the religious identity. Jeff moved from an atheist identity to take on the identity of the group he once despised, Christians. How in the world did that dramatic shift happen? I hope you’ll listen in today to see how this story plays out. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jeff. It’s wonderful to have you on today. Hi, Jana. It’s great to be here. You’re a familiar voice to me. We met several years ago. We both have a mutual affiliation with the C.S. Lewis Institute here in Atlanta, and so that’s where I got to know you a little bit and got to know a little bit about your story, so having you on the program today is truly exciting for me, because I know the dramatic changes that you have made in your life. In fact, you’re doing some pretty amazing things now in terms of even your current study of theology at the graduate level. Can you talk with me a little bit about just who you are now and what you do, so everyone gets a chance to know a little bit about who you are. Yeah, sure. So I work as a software manager at an engineering company here in the Atlanta area, I’m still in school, but I have switched my major from theology to Old Testament. I just had a lot of interest in looking deeper into the Old Testament, the history of the text transmission and things like that. So that’s my current focus in school, working on a Masters of Arts in Old Testament Studies right now. I know, in your story, you’ve come a long way from where you were, from your atheism. So why don’t we start at the beginning, in your childhood, and give me a sense of the home in which you grew up, your family, perhaps your friends and the culture. Was there God in that world at all before you had a sense of your atheism? Tell me about that. It’s a very interesting question because there was God in the sense that some members of my family would consider themselves Catholic from an upbringing perspective, but there was not God in the sense that we ever went to church or prayed or talked about God or anything like that. So we’d occasionally get together, and when my grandparents were in town, for example, my stepmother’s parents, they would pray, and they were pretty devout in their faith, so they would go to church. We would say grace for supper every night, even though that was about the only time we talked about God. Other than when my Dad would hit his hand with a hammer or something like that, and then I heard God’s name quite often. Okay, yeah. But growing up we didn’t really have much interaction with other Christian families. My friends, there were no Christians in my peer group, at least not that I knew of. If they were, they were closet Christians. Primarily I hung out with people that were pretty much humanists and a lot of interest in the occult and anti-Christian sentiment. So a lot of it was rooted in some of the punk rock culture and the New Wave/industrial music scene and things like that. So a lot of the people that I hung out with could consider themselves Wiccans or witches or humanists or even Satanists in many cases. Not a lot of Christians. So, Jeff, as you were growing up, you had some dots of religiosity with a dinner prayer, that kind of thing, but it’s obviously not something that your family took on with any serious nature. As a child, it sounds like it was just part of the routine but nothing more, but I would imagine that these humanist friends that you had, was that more towards like middle school, early teen? Or high school? Tell me about when you started hanging out with these friends. It was really late middle school and going into high school, I guess, is where that really started. And just one point from the earlier comment. I do remember one time clearly going to Mass with my stepmother’s parents, and my dad went with me, and I remember as we walked into the Mass, they had the holy water set to the side, so that you could genuflect, make the sign of the cross and all of that, and I remember watching my grandparents, step grandparents, go in and dip their fingers in the water and cross themselves, and as a young kid, I wanted to emulate that behavior, and I remember reaching over to touch the water and my dad pushing my hand away. So it was a very interesting dichotomy because, on the one hand, we’d do these supper prayers. On the other hand, when we are engaging these rituals in a Mass setting, it’s something he didn’t want me to participate in. And it’s funny because I’ve never talked to him about it. I never really thought much about it. But it’s just an interesting contrast. Yeah. It makes you wonder why he would almost endorse a ritual in one sense but not in another. Yeah. I’m sure that was a little bit confusing for you. It was. But as a nice young person I just put it aside and didn’t think about it for years. Yeah, yeah. I’m sure. So your impression of God or religion or Christianity at that time, growing up, particularly in your teenage years, as you were, it sounds like, part of a group that was rejecting all of that. Did you have any views towards religious people or institutions? Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think that actually gets at the root of what my religiosity was. Because it was really focused on people. And I’ve told a number of people over the years that, as an atheist, I actually wasn’t a very educated atheist. I was educated in my observation of people but not educated earlier on in the way atheists approached questions about who God is and the historicity of the Gospel accounts or things like that. So it was very much a focus on people, and even more so a focus on how I perceived Christian people to be, particularly with my peer group and my desires as a young man. It was primarily centered around hedonistic enjoyments, and so for me, Christians were those that were trying to take away any fun out of life, take away the joys of life. Yeah. And that’s interesting, especially related to even the… perhaps not only the activities that you were involved that were no doubt pleasurable on some level, but also you hinted that there was some kind of dark spirituality that you were even interested in. I’m curious about that aspect of your kind of pushing away from one form of spirituality but actually engaging in another. I think on some level there was a part of me that wanted to believe in something more, and I remember, at a younger age, maybe earlier middle school or sometime in middle school, reading The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, which was talking about King Arthur legends and Merlin and things like that, and I remember at one point—part of the story line centers around Mithraism and the idea that perhaps Merlin was this Mithraist and that’s where his power came from, and I don’t remember the story that well, but I do remember the aspects of Mithraism, and so I recall walking to the bus stop one morning and tying this little spruce branch around a tree and sort of doing this little offering idea, and I think I was always enchanted by the idea that there’s something greater, but I didn’t really believe in it, particularly as I got older. So while I had friends that were involved in Wiccan religion and some paganism, I didn’t really have the sense that there was this devil that would listen to you if you decided to become a Satanist or that you could influence nature as a witch or anything like that. But I wanted it to be true on some level. And, in fact, I embraced the humanistic aspects of Satanism, to the point that I had a copy of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible and read through that and was really enamored with that sort of mindset. I know that the humanistic impetus in that movement is very strongly that you’re the captain of your own ship and a very strong sense of autonomy and control over your own destiny. Was that appealing to you? Oh, absolutely! A big part of that is, “If it feels good, do it,” and I think our modern culture even has quite a sense of that as well, which is, “If it feels good, it can’t be wrong unless it starts to encroach on somebody else’s boundaries.” And so, for me, that was a very appealing message, and again, as young man with a desire to have the sensual enjoyment in life, that was very compelling, to say, “Whatever feels good to you, go ahead and and do it.” So in a sense, then, you were involved with friends and your particular culture that was pushing away, I guess almost an anti-God sensibility, from religion and religious things, but at the same time, you said that you were focused on the people and that there was a negative hue or a negative perception of Christians and Christianity. What informed that? Was that informed by the actual experience with Christians? Or was it something that was informed more by what people were saying and what you perhaps wanted to hear? That’s a really good question. I think that some aspects of it were certainly informed by the media, and in particular, this was growing up as a teenager in the eighties and watching MTV and music videos. As an eighties kid, there was a lot of push back against the culture. I remember—I was speaking about it to somebody the other day—the Genesis video with Ronald Reagan and just this idea to push back against authority. And then Reagan and Nancy and the Moral Majority and all of those influences, where you’re looking at this media imagery of far right people wanting to put censorship labels on music. And you just sort of built this view of Christians as this vocal group of people that want to take away anything that you might enjoy. But again, I wasn’t really informed by a lot of direct personal experience with individuals. It was more of a collective thing. I see. Yeah. Because it sounds like there weren’t a lot of Christians, I suppose, in your world. No. Not at all. I would imagine, too, that it would be easy to develop a bit of an us/them kind of mentality and strengthen your understanding or perception of who you think someone is without direct engagement. That’s a very easy thing to do. Absolutely. So you were developing this sense of identity, this, I would imagine, anti-Christian identity, informed by your friends and the culture, your moral choices. Was there anything else involved in that? Perhaps education or your view of science or anything else that contributed to that push back against Christians and Christianity? As I said, I wasn’t a terribly educated atheist. In fact, I’m much more educated in atheist arguments at this point in life than I was at that age. But I did think that science was the answer to everything, so it was, in a sense, my religion. Although again—I was a smart kid. I had a good education. I understood basic scientific principles. But I did not really have a clear sense of all the different lines of argumentation that I’m aware of today. Nevertheless, I still felt like the earth began with the big bang and everything evolved, and where was the need for God in all of that? Science could explain all the questions that we have. And religion was just some holdover from a time where people didn’t have any understanding of the universe they lived in. So I absolutely held that prejudice, but again, it wasn’t a terribly well-informed prejudice. It was just something that I inherited by default. So Jeff, it sounds like, again, you were pretty well comfortable with your identity as an atheist. How old were you, by the way, when you really identified yourself with that label. I think the first time I applied that to myself was when I joined the Army. In fact, when I joined the Army and they were issuing my dog tags, they ask you for your religious preference. And I had never really thought much about it as a question, and so I put atheist on there as my religious preference, and it was, I think, the first time I had ever thought enough about it to say, “This is what I am.” Later, I remember having to get dog tags reissued, and they refused to put atheist on there for some reason. It was very strange. So I put agnostic, but I really still considered myself an atheist. And I think I did teeter back and forth a little bit, only because it seemed like atheist was such a firm position to take, and how much can we truly know? So while I was functionally an atheist, sometimes I would label myself as an agnostic. So then, Jeff, walk us along. Tell us what seemed to move you in a different direction. What seemed to cause you to perhaps question this identity or the way that you were thinking about God and Christians and Christianity? It’s a difficult question to answer on some levels because I don’t really know when the transformation of thinking began. When I look back at the influences that stuck with me, many of them were things that happened, but I didn’t recognize until later that they had some impact. So for example, as a 19-year-old person with an attitude, I had a Jehovah’s Witness come to my door, and he wanted to talk to me. And I was feeling particularly obstinate that day, so I invited him in, and he started talking to me about what he believed, and at some point in the discussion, he was talking about the Bible, and I said, “Well, what makes yours more valid than mine?” And he said, “Well, what do you mean?” And I walked back and I brought out LaVey’s Satanic Bible. And I fully expected this to have the guy kind of walk out on me, and he didn’t. He stayed and engaged. And I had asked a number of questions, and I remember, several days after he had visited, he came back, and he had a stack of papers that he had printed out that had answers to a number of the questions that I had asked. And I never even looked at them. I threw them away. And to this day, I’m not even completely sure he was Jehovah’s Witness because I don’t really remember, but he knocked on the door and wanted to talk about God. But looking back, I recognize the impact that that had on me, because this guy believed what he was selling enough to come back to an obstinate kid and want to give him the education, to give him the answers that the kid was asking for. So things like that, as I look back, I see that there were a number of occasions that were similar to that throughout my life. And I think, over time, those softened me a bit. And I was able to start to see that it’s not just a bunch of hypocrites but that there are people that really do put into practice what they say they believe, and they take it seriously. And so as I started working in a professional career, I was 29 when I finally accepted Christ, and over a few years prior to that moment—and it really wasn’t a moment. It was actually a process. But a few years prior to that, I had been befriended by a guy who I worked with named Greg, and Greg was a very devout Christian, and I had another friend named Kevin who was a very devout atheist, and it was that picture of the angel and the devil on your shoulder, each one whispering in your ear. But Greg and I would talk quite a bit, and I would ask questions, and he would have answers. And when he didn’t have answers, he would find answers. And as I started questioning what I believed about the origin of the universe and what existed prior to the big bang and how did it come to be, some of those questions really started to nag at me. And I thought, “I need to look into this a bit more.” And those were the kind of questions that Greg actually wasn’t very well educated in, but he had friends who were, and he would get resources and help me to start to explore some of those things. And so, over time, that exploration is what led me to change my views and come ultimately to believe that Christ is who He says He is. Who Christianity claims that He was. Wow! That’s interesting because… especially the way that you describe your being softened to the possibility of God, that it came through people who authentically believed. It wasn’t just a ritual that they performed or I guess a service that they showed up to and lived differently through the week. You engaged with people who actually took their faith seriously, and believed that there were answers to be found within religious faith, which I’m sure was a bit novel in a way, particularly not only with regard to answers spiritually, but also answers you’re describing even with regard to reality and the world and the cosmos. You’re talking about a bigger picture of reality and having answers to questions like that. I find it interesting, too, that you had these two friends, both kind of speaking into your ear and into your life. Was that a bit challenging at times? I’m also curious. Did your atheist friend find substantive answers for you when you were looking for them? Interestingly, no. And I think part of that is because there’s a certain degree of posturing that goes on as you’re coming to these questions about what you really fundamentally believe. And so I had a reputation as a loud person of atheistic persuasion, and so, with my friend at the time, my atheist friend, I probably was not very forthright with my questions and this process. Because you don’t want to be seen as somebody who might be going to the other side, although to be fair, I didn’t think that I was. I had no belief that I was actually changing what I ultimately thought or believed to be true, but I just had these questions. And I didn’t take the other questions back to this guy. The Christian friend was a compelling place to go and ask because of the authenticity. And because he really did live out what it looks like to be a Christian, with the humility and the kindness and the love and the gentleness. And so he was very approachable in that way. And I didn’t feel judged by going to him. And I would have felt judged going to my atheist friend and saying, “Hey, I’m looking at these questions, and there’s something compelling about this Christianity thing.” So I was not very comfortable going to my atheist friend, which is interesting. Yes, yes. So I would imagine, in this exploration, it was intellectual. There were answers that you were seeking. How long did this process take? I presume, over time, that as you were finding answers that you were able to see how those answers were making sense, not only of the world but of the way that you were living or perceiving life? Yeah. And it was a fairly lengthy process for me. And this is where our relationship with the C.S. Lewis Institute is interesting because I can very much appreciate Lewis’s journey from an atheist to a theist to a Christian and the time that that took. And I can also appreciate his story about his motorcycle ride where, when he departed he wasn’t a Christian, and when he arrived, he was, if I remember it correctly. I have that view, to some extent, of my personal journey as well. Because, as I started down that road, I started believing that there must be something more and particularly looking at the origin of the universe as one of the big questions. The scientific answers just ceased to make sense for me after a while, and they almost became a little bit reaching, particularly when you start looking into multiverse theories and things like that. It seemed to me that you’re exercising a different kind of faith to kind of go down that road, so as I became more of a theist and open to the idea, my wife, at the same time, who has grown up in a Christian home and was a very strong Christian as a young person, started returning to the church and found that she wanted to raise our kids with Christianity which, early on in particular, a very contentious desire for her. It was contentious within our relationship. I didn’t want my kids to be raised as Christians. I certainly didn’t want her giving money to the church, which, for some reason, bothered me more than the idea of her raising my kids as Christians, and so as she started returning to church, I started being more open, and it was during this time that, one morning I woke up, and she was getting the kids ready to go to church, and I said, “I think I’ll go to church with you today.” To this day, there was nothing besides God that I could say that informed that desire, because I was adamantly opposed to it up until that point. And so I went. And it was one of those stereotypical moments that you hear about where the pastor seemed to be speaking right to me. And that was not a conversion moment for me, but it was a moment that continued to open me to the possibility that maybe Christianity does hold some answers. And so that helped me to get past that obstacle of going more into almost a theism to being open to a greater possibility of theism to being open to the possibility of the truth of Christianity. One thing I think about when I hear your journeying is you continue, beginning at some point you became open to the possibility of God. And then you became open to another aspect. Something softened in you because of seeing authenticity or commitment to faith or perhaps you became more open because you started questioning. And you allowed yourself the possibility of another worldview being true. And that strikes me because oftentimes, if we’re not open, it’s hard to really see and weigh your current worldview versus potentially another worldview or the explanatory power of another worldview. And to me it sounds like you were making intentional choices to be open to another perspective. Oftentimes we hear there’s no evidence for God, and so if there’s no evidence then it’s not even worth engaging for some. How would you respond to someone who might make that declaration, “There’s no evidence for God,” in terms of perhaps even openness to consider another perspective. Yeah. It’s a great question. And one of the difficulties in talking about evidence for God is that there is no single one thing that you can point at and say definitively, “There you go. God exists.” By the same token, there’s no one thing you can point at definitively and say, “There you go. God does not exist.” And so for me it was ultimately a cumulative case, where there are a variety of evidences and things that we believe to be true, hold to be true, understand to be true. Things that we scientifically believe and things that we intuitively believe. And I spoke earlier about morality as an example of right and wrong and the idea that right and wrong is either grounded in something or it’s just grounded in our own preferences and group-think. And particularly in America today as we look at all of the division and the challenges that we face as a country, of people that have different views of what’s right and what’s wrong, we all believe instinctively that there’s something grounding that sense of right and wrong. And so being open to the possibility that that foundation is, in fact, God, that without God, there is no ultimate floor for morality. It really is a question of preference. And so as we start to wrestle with our own priorities, in life and in how we engage the world, I think this question keeps coming up. As I look at beauty, how do I understand beauty? Recognizing that different people view things differently. How do I understand morality, recognizing that people have different beliefs about different subjects. And being open to the possibility that God ultimately is and can be a foundation to those beliefs and thoughts and considering that. And looking then at the different evidences that are available, at the different ways of approaching the subject. So yeah, as you were saying, I think sometimes it really does require a little bit of openness to take a look at the evidence that’s there, but I’m glad that you really emphasize here that there’s not one sort of bulletproof argument for God, if you will. That Jesus is not the end of a philosophical argument, although of course there are other things like the resurrection that really historically, evidentially ground the reality of His resurrection and claim to be God. Some perhaps have a little bit more evidential value than others, but still, as you say, it’s not just one thing. It’s a combination of things. And I applaud you for really being open to taking a journey of exploration because, for most of us, I think we like to live in the comfort of our own worldview and not be challenged, but you were willing to go on a journey. And that’s not an easy thing to do. For your worldview and your world, really, to flip upside down. Yeah. I think you make a really great point, and I just wanted to weigh in on that and say that I think you’re absolutely right, and particularly with the resurrection. That was a significant factor for me. And particularly as you look at how the church spoke about Jesus and wrote about Jesus. It was all based on the resurrection. And you look at Paul’s writings, and he essentially says, “If Christ has not been raised, then your hope is in vain.” And, to me, that is an interesting confirmation of the fact that these Christian writers were making claims that they believed to be true because they’re flat-out saying, “If He didn’t come back from the dead, all of this is just a joke. It’s useless. So go on and do something else.” That aspect of Christianity has always been very important to me because it is making the claim that our faith is rooted in an actual event that took place at a particular point in time. For those who might be listening and are curious about perhaps what resources you might have looked at in investigating some of these big questions, do you have any recommendations? Great question. Of course we mentioned C.S. Lewis Institute, so I have to say that C.S. Lewis has a number of books on various topics. I think Mere Christianity is a great starting point to be open to exploring some of these questions of what is Christianity and what do Christians believe and why is it compelling. I think moving on, his book on miracles, for me, is a very interesting one and compelling because it’s essentially… To distill it down, it’s opening up to the possibility of miracles and understanding them in their context and whether or not they logically could exist. I think there are a number of great books written by different philosophers, Alvin Plantinga comes to mind, to just explore some of the questions. And there’s a number of books on Old Testament history, and I guess, as I think about it, maybe the answer is so difficult to come up with, particular set of resources, because I recognize that everyone’s challenges are in different areas, so some people might have challenges with the historicity, and some people might have challenges with some of the ethical claims or moral claims. And so it’s more difficult than to make a single recommendation or a couple of recommendations, because people are going to want to research in the area where they’re most passionate. Right. You mentioned, as part of your journeying, that you read the Bible, perhaps for the first time. Was your experience with that informative or enlightening or surprising or those kinds of things, in terms of your own journeying? Very much so. And as I mentioned, I had started going to church, and so there were a lot of things I was unfamiliar with. Growing up in the US as a kid, I remember going to the dentist, and they always had these big blue book of Bible stories and things like that, so I had that level of exposure as a very young child. As an older kid, I didn’t have any exposure whatsoever, so I wasn’t fluent with any of the Bible stories. When my wife started taking our kids back to church, she subsequently bought a lot of Veggie Tales videos, which is this animated cartoons about vegetables singing and talking about God, so my biblical knowledge was pretty well informed by Veggie Tales more than anything else. So on one level, as I would read through these stories, correlating the cucumber and an actual person from the Bible is fun and exciting. But the biggest thing was just, again, as I said earlier, seeing pictures of Jesus throughout the scripture. And when I came to the New Testament, that’s when it really all started to click into place. Reading through the Old Testament was challenging, and you see stories that, they’re hard to make sense of. And you have a lot of questions. But when you get into the New Testament and you start to see how Jesus can answer those questions and make sense of some of those stories that were difficult, I think that’s where things really began to click for me. And so, as I talked about the 34-week Bible study that I was in, it was the latter part of that when we had finally gotten into the New Testament which was when I became a Christian. And even then, going on from there, I think there was still a process. I can’t put a finger on an exact day. So everything kind of started to come together to make sense as a whole, as an understanding of the world, of yourself, of reality. As we’re wrapping up our conversation, I do want to, here at the end, give you an opportunity to talk with somebody who may be listening who is curious, not only about your journey but perhaps their own, and that they may have that sense of openness perhaps that you had at one point. What would you say to someone who is a curious skeptic and intrigued by the possibility of God and Jesus and Christianity and the Bible? I think the first thing I would say is that there’s a lot of noise on both sides. There are a lot of voices clamoring to be heard. And for me, it was important to take myself out of that a bit and to recognize that there are experts on both sides of this subject. There are experts scientifically. There are experts philosophically and theologically. There are people that are experts in the Bible and the transmission of texts, some of which believe and some of which don’t believe. And being open to the reality that there are people with the same inputs that reach different conclusions. So recognizing the impact that your worldview, what you believe about the world and the way things work, is going to have on your ability to receive some of the information you’re studying and being open to the possibility that your worldview is perhaps skewed. And allowing for the possibility that the other side might have something true to say. And spending time researching both sides diligently. And it’s easy sometimes to fall off to one side or the other and not look at both sides, so I think it’s important to look at both sides critically but openly. I think that’s great advice. No matter which direction you’re coming from. It’s always good to be thoughtful about not only your ideas and your worldview but others as well. And for those who are listening today who perhaps are believers in Christianity and in God, and they want to be able to engage with those who don’t see life and the reality and the world the same way, what would you say to them to help foster a greater example, like you mentioned in your story you had people cross your path who were a real embodied example of Christianity that, on some level, you found attractive. Can you speak to that? Yeah. I would say be slow to speak and quick to listen. People want to be heard, and they want to know that you’re listening to what they’re asking, that you care about what’s important to them, and no one wants to feel like you’re just there to put a notch in a belt or to get your word in, so listen carefully to what people have to say and hear their genuine concerns, and then seek to find the answers to those concerns. And don’t just go in with a program or an agenda. Take time. And don’t bucket people into one group. There’s many different beliefs across the spectrum of atheism, agnosticism, Buddhism, etc., as there are within Christianity. There are a lot of different things that people believe, so take the time to get to know someone, care about them genuinely, and answer their questions sincerely. I think that’s excellent, excellent advice, Jeff. Thank you so much for coming on today, telling your story, giving us advice, and just some tremendous insights, not only into your journey but challenging us all to really be more thoughtful about what it is that we believe and why we believe it, so it’s encouraging and exciting for me to hear such a dramatic change, really, from actually someone who has an Anton LaVey Satanic Bible on their coffee table to now having a Christian or Judeo-Christian Bible that you’re actually spending time studying at the graduate level. Wow! If someone doesn’t say that’s a transformation, I don’t know what is. So I’m just excited and encouraged really for people to listen to your story and to really be challenged in their own way of thinking and living, so thank you so much for coming on. Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s very exciting. Great. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jeff’s story today. You can find out more about the C.S. Lewis Institute, as well as some of his book resources that he recommended during his story 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, and if so, subscribe and 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 again how someone else flips the record of their life.  

A Christian for 15 years, Jim rejected his faith and identified as an humanist-atheist for nine years.  Although he could not see a possible return to God, he found a more robust faith than he had once left. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we hear how someone flips the record of their life from atheism to Christianity. Each podcast, we typically listen to the story of someone who was an atheist and became a Christian. Today’s story is a little bit different. Jim was a Christian who became an atheist, who then found a more robust form of Christianity and reconverted. A commited Christian for 15 years, he left Christianity in his mid 30s and passionately identified as a humanist atheist for nine years. During that time, he genuinely could not see how he could possibly go back to believing in God again, and yet he did, with his faith even stronger for the experience. I hope you’ll come and listen and explore Jim’s extraordinary story with me. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jim. It’s so great to have you! It’s good to be talking with you. I love that English accent. Having gone to school there. I’m sure our listeners will really appreciate it, too. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, Jim? Well, as you know, my name is Jim and I’m from the UK. I live in Swindon currently, which is about 80 miles west of London, actually not that far from Oxford. But I was brought up in London, in the east side of London, a place called Rainham, and now I live in Swindon. I am an IT audit manager. I’ve worked in IT for about 15 to 20 years. I’m married to Liz, and I have two kids, one Hannah, who’s just recently gotten married despite the COVID-19 situation and the various lockdowns that we’ve had.   And I have a son who’s just finished secondary school, and he’s started college now. So that’s us. Family of four. And I’m in my late 40s, and yeah. So that’s a brief introduction to me. That’s terrific. It certainly gives us an idea of who you are and where you are in the world, really. And congratulations on your daughter’s wedding. Thank you. That’s really wonderful. So let’s go back to your childhood, it sounds like in East London, where you grew up, to get your story started. Was God any part of the picture at all among your family and your friends and even around your local culture? Well, I wasn’t brought up a Christian, but I was fairly ambivalent towards faith and religion, I’d say, generally. I would probably describe my upbringing as a very typical British upbringing where, when it comes to faith, and in particular Christianity, my views about Christianity were formed mostly through the lens of popular cultural influences and references, like Christmas and I can remember Nativity plays. I think my idea of Jesus was formed mostly through a film called Jesus of Nazareth that starred an actor called Robert Powell, who is a classic blue eyed, dark haired European-looking man who kind of wandered the hills of Palestine sort of listfully floating around, making short sentence statements about different parables and perhaps not easily understood who was just a nice man who was mistreated by Roman soldiers, and I think that’s pretty much all I knew about Jesus. And my idea of religion was that it was just something that was there. I neither was against faith and religion or for it. You probably know that, in the UK, we have a long history when it comes to Christianity and the church. We have the Church of England, and we have a lot of pageantry and a lot of traditions, so I just saw Christianity as something that was very much tied to the Church of England, old churches, old parishes, and effectively just Christianity was a way of being nice and being good but wrapped up in religious ritual, I think is probably how I kind of saw it. And my parents, they didn’t go to church. And again, I think they had a similar view, that Christianity was something that was nice but not something that we particularly were invested in, and religion was okay, as long as it was on balance and that you kept your feet firmly on the ground, and I think probably that there was a sense of right and wrong that I had as a young person, but I didn’t really think about where that morality came from. I just kind of had that sense that, “Well, if there is a God, I haven’t robbed a supermarket, so I’ll probably be okay.” So that was kind of my view of Christianity. Didn’t really give it much thought and was quite happy to, as a young person, explore life and all of life’s opportunities. So it sounds like you had a pretty good childhood and a nice family, a nice life. You did good things. You were a moral person, just along with the culture. So did you explore what you did believe? If you didn’t believe in religious institutions or in religious tenets, that they were nice stories or cultural rituals but not much more than that, did you consider what you did believe at that point? Or was it just kind of going with the flow? I think it was going with the flow more than anything, and I think that… I was brought up in the eighties in my teenage years, and I don’t know about [UNKNOWN 07:54], but I think, for me, the term atheist tended to have negative connotations of some sort. I don’t know why, but I tended to think that. So I wouldn’t have described myself as an atheist. I just didn’t really have any passionate views on faith or religion, and I didn’t know much about religion. A lot of that changed, though, when I went to university, and it was… When I went to Dundee University in Scotland that was a story of coming to terms with the future that I was stepping into. I was doing a degree, but I was struggling with whether that degree was actually the degree that I wanted to do, asking questions about where it would lead to, and I think I did have periods of reflection as a young man at university who embraced all of the social benefits, as I saw them, of being at a university, going out to pubs and drinking and socializing and all of that kind of thing And I found myself faced with the kind of life questions I think that a lot of people do ask themselves about life’s meaning and life’s purpose and where I was going. And the turning point for me was when I realized that I wasn’t really taking care of myself, and I was struggling with motivation, particularly to kind of think, “Well, what is the point? I could get this degree. I could aim for success. But I don’t know what success looks like. I could aim for something in life, but I don’t know what that purpose is,” and I was missing out on a lot of lectures and not doing very well. And I realized, “If I don’t get my act together, my life is just going to take a bit of a tumble, and I need to do something about this.” And so I decided that what I would do is I’d hang around with those friends that I knew who seemed to kind of do life pretty well and were disciplined when it came to study and seemed to be a good influence, and I didn’t really realize this at the time, but it turned out that the group of people that I hung out with were all Christians, and so I found myself in the company of Christians, and the strange thing is that I found out months later that, in the corridor in [UNKNOWN 10:36], where I was staying, I think there were about three or four Christian guys who were all in this corridor, half of whom had actually moved into that corridor in the first term through various reasons, and in fact, I myself had come to be in that corridor because there was a mix-up with the room allocation, so there were all these coincidences that I found out afterwards that led me to being surrounded by Christians. I was tripping over them. Yeah. I would imagine that would’ve been quite unusual, really, in Britain, actually, in the eighties, like you said. It was a nominally Christian culture but really not much more than that. So that is an interesting coincidence of sorts. Yeah. That’s right. And I often put it this way: I accidentally became a Christian. And what I mean by that is I was talking to a visiting friend of the guy opposite me, a chap called Ian, and I was in his room, and this girl, Maggie, was visiting, And she kept talking about this place called Menzieshill, and I thought this was a park or a woodland or something, and eventually, she said, “Would you like to come to Menzieshill, because we’re going this afternoon, and I said, “Sure. Why not?” It was a nice sunny afternoon on a Sunday, so we’re in the back of her car, and I was talking to Ian, and I said, “What kind of park is this Menzieshill? Is it a park with swings and playgrounds and things like that? Is it like open kind of fields?” And he just looked at me incredulously and said, “Menzieshill is a church.” And I remember kind of thinking… I kind of felt two things, really. One, I thought, “Oh, my gosh! What have I done?” And then the other thing I thought was, “Oh, actually it might be quite nice to go to church.” And so I sat in this Church of Scotland Church, and I don’t remember what the sermon was, but I do remember that I had a strong sense of being like a child and a sense that there was something here where there was a second chance, a second opportunity for me to do life differently. And the long story short, I went through this journey of discovering the Bible. I read a Gospel that somebody gave me. I was asking questions. And another Sunday we went to the church, and they had communion, and as they were passing around the bread and the wine, I said to Ian, “Should I take this?” And he said, “Well, you ought to be a Christian if you’re taking Communion,” and I said to him, “Well, my mom and dad never christened me when I was a child because they thought faith needs to be your own decision. We won’t baptize you as a young infant,” And this is almost embarrassing, I thought the word Christian came from christened. It didn’t dawn on me that the word Christian came from Christ. So I assumed in my head that a Christian was someone who’d been baptized as an infant and had been through some kind of ceremony and declared by a vicar or a priest as a Christian and perhaps given some kind of scroll or certificate or something like that. And so I said to Ian, “I wasn’t christened,” and he said, “No, no, no. It doesn’t matter. That’s not that, but you should be a Christian,” and then afterwards, when we had a conversation about this, I realized that we were getting our wires crossed, and I said to Ian, “I’m getting confused here. What is a Christian?” And when he told me that a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus and has decided to follow Him and that this was a personal decision that you made, not something that you are granted by an official, I said him, “Well, I did that last Wednesday,” and he said, “Well, then you’re a Christian.” And this was news to me. And the reason why is because it suddenly dawned on me that faith and religion can be quite different things. It’s one thing to have faith in and to follow and be committed to the person of Jesus Christ. It’s another thing to just adopt a religious framework and all of the kind of things and trappings that come with that. And I was amazed by that. That was a real revelation to me because, again, having come from no Christian background at all, I was relieved and amazed and very grateful that actually I could call myself a Christian. Based not on meeting certain requirements of an institution. So that was how I first became a Christian. At the age of 19 at university in Scotland in Dundee. And remained a Christian for 15 years. So obviously something happened. But before we get to that, so your experience as a Christian for those… did you say 15 years? Yeah. How was your experience as a Christian? Before you decided that wasn’t for you? So I was very committed, and I was part of a very strong Christian union at the university, read my Bible, prayed, shared the gospel where I could on campus, and after university, I spent a year on mission in Kenya with an organization called Africa Inland Mission, teaching at a school and preaching in a church just southeast of Nairobi. And then I came back to Dundee, and by this stage, it was the mid nineties, and stayed in Scotland for a short while and then moved back to London and attended a church there, where I met my wife, Liz, and we had our daughter Hannah. And so my faith continued, and I was certainly very committed. If people ask, “Well, were you really a Christian? Did you really give your life to God? Were you really committed?” The answer to that is absolutely yes. I was a Christian. I understood the Gospel. I’d responded to it. And I had committed my life to Christ and chose to follow him. I think what happened, though, is you don’t just suddenly wake up one night and decide that you’re going to throw all that away. And it’s a long story. Lots of different things happened, but I think that probably the way I would summarize it, to begin with, is that I started, over years, to lose the simplicity of the Gospel. My faith, which was based on the Person I knew, became more about what I knew and whether I was right about things. And so the relationship with God kind of took the back stage, and what was front and center stage was more whether I was right about different things. It was the Gospel plus I have to have this doctrine right, and I have to be right on this nature of Christian walk and Christian living, and I think that, coupled with the kind of daily grind of life. Trying to cut out a career. Trying to cope with domestic life. And also I think when you go out into the outside world. I found that there were good people who were not Christians. I mean according them good in the sense of broadly speaking the way one might use that term. But they were people who were getting on with life who didn’t have faith, and I think that, if faith becomes ordinary and mundane, it just becomes less distinct. The Christian faith can become less distinct from any other religion or any other view, and I think that there are also areas of my life where perhaps there were compromises, not necessarily big compromises, but I think that what I found was that my life outside of church just looked very different from my life on a Sunday, and so I almost found myself living this dual life, really, where there was a kind of Christian side to me, and it was compartmentalized away from the rest of me, which was all about trying to get on with life, trying to achieve things, trying to do well in my job, trying to get on with the people who I worked with, all of those kind of things. And I think that’s what kind of happened over the years. And there was also this sense that your faith and Christianity becomes more complex in the sense of we all have to face into the fact that there are different denominations, there are different churches, that Christians don’t agree on everything, but I think that, for me, what I think happened was that truth mattered, certainly mattered to me, and continued to matter to me, but I found myself feeling that my Christian life was so far away from the lives of those who I worked with who weren’t Christians that it became very much an us and them kind of situation. And it felt like Christianity and church was just becoming a smaller and smaller island, if you like, of people who agree with you. And that was how I started to see it. From an emotional level I found myself struggling with trying to balance the kind of working life and the pressures of life with what faith meant to me on a daily basis. And I think intellectually I did have questions, but to begin with, I think those questions weren’t necessarily initially a challenge to my faith in the sense that they would necessarily lead me to reject my faith. I think what happened is a combination of all of these different things that kind of brought me to a point where, again, as I said, in some of the beginning, my faith just became like a philosophy, really. More about what I knew and not about personal relationship. And once God doesn’t mean that much to you in your daily life, the next logical step is, “Well, then why believe? Why carry on believing?” And so I started to investigate some questions. I was probably more challenged around questions of science, particularly around origins and evolution. I was asking myself questions about that. I was asking myself questions about salvation and what happens to people who haven’t heard the gospel. These kind of things that are challenges and we try to grapple with. But I did it very much in isolation. I didn’t really talk to people about it. It was more of an introverted journey that I went on. And I think that things just started to erode away. And eventually I remember I kind of raised some of these things with my wife one evening, because she could tell that I wasn’t myself. And I was a bit reluctant to kind of open up, and she said, “You’re not yourself. What’s going on?” And it kind of opened up this door where suddenly I just blurted out all these different memes, I think they’re called, aren’t they? All these different kind of thoughts that I’d dabbled together over a period of months and just blurted out all these questions and doubts that I was having, and I think poor Liz just didn’t have a clue where this came from, and she’s like, “Whoa! Where’s all this coming from?” And so that was quite a testing time. I think I was probably already, in my heart, on my journey away from God at this stage, but the one thing that I was concerned about was I was a member of the church in North Swindon. I had a church community around me. My wife was still a Christian. And I was obviously concerned about how this could affect my relationships, my relationship with my wife and with my family and those friends around me who were Christians. And that was obviously really important to me, and I didn’t want to… It wasn’t so much I didn’t want to disappoint them, but I didn’t want those relationships to break down so much. I certainly didn’t want my marriage to break down, and I was kind of faced with that, “Do I just keep this to myself and keep going to church and just put on kind of the right expression and turn up, don’t say anything, and then just live your life like that?” And I kind of did that for six months, and then it all came to a head when one of the elders in the church said, “Could you give a testimony in a couple of weeks?” And I think that was it, really. I thought, “I don’t think, in good conscience, that I could do that,” and so I phoned him up and said, “Look, I’m really sorry, but I won’t be coming to church anymore. I just don’t believe anymore,” and I stopped attending. And then that led to, obviously, a challenging period for me and my wife to kind of reconcile that and work through that. Obviously, it was quite a stunning surprise for your wife. But as you were going through this process and you came to this culmination point, and the church, you were forthright with them and truthful. Did they try to approach your doubts or skepticism with any kind of intention at all? Did they engage you on why you had left? Or did they just let you go? They did reach out to me. They were very gracious, actually, and I think, looking back, they were really good. They were very gentle. The elder of the church who I called up to say I didn’t believe anymore… the pastor of the church was on sabbatical back in the US for a few months, and so it was one of the elders who was running things, and he met with me in a Starbucks coffee shop, and he just wanted to understand what’s happened, and I talked to him about things like: Is the Bible really the word of God? How do we know it’s true? Isn’t it just that there was a council that made the decision that this is what is scripture, what is canonical, and therefore isn’t it all just manmade? Doesn’t the science suggest that we’ve just evolved and that we are just physical, material beings? What about rational thinking and reason? Shouldn’t we be prepared to question why we believe things? And all sorts of things that came up. And I remember he responded and said, and this is a bit embarrassing, really. He said, “I’m not very intellectual, and obviously you are, and you’ve got these questions, and I don’t really have the answers to all of those. Or I can’t answer them sufficiently.” He said, “But I’m happy to keep a dialogue with you.” And I’m a bit embarrassed by that in the sense that I don’t see myself as very intellectual. Because I thought, “Well, actually, I don’t know whether, hand on heart, I could say that I’d fully investigated these things or fully done my homework or had given opportunity for engagement with somebody, to say, ‘Look, I’m having these questions, and I want to explore them.'” And I remember, when the pastor returned from sabbatical in the US, and he’d found, anyway, because they called him on the phone and said, “Look, Jim’s not attending church anymore,” and he got in touch and said, “Hey, I’d love to meet you for a coffee,” and by this point, my attitude at the time was very defensive. I think I kind of saw myself as, “Look, I’ve been a born-again Christian. I’m familiar with the inner workings of evangelical Christianity. You can’t fool me. I know your tricks. I know you’re just trying to bring me back in.” And so I had this very defensive, nonengaging position that I’d adopted. And thought, “I will do the honor of meeting with you and have a coffee,” and he asked a few questions, and we had a bit of a discussion. And he certainly struck me as someone, from his answers, who had a lot more to say and said, “There are really good answers to these questions, and a lot of what you said, I think, isn’t strictly true.” And he said, “I’ve been reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and do you want to go through that?” And I’d read The God Delusion, but I remember I just turned him down. I said, “No, I’d rather just carry on with my life,” and I remember he was really disappointed. I remember walking away from that meeting and the look of disappointment on his face because I wasn’t prepared to engage, and I think, again, this is because—I know everyone’s experience is different, and some people would say that they don’t feel the same way, but even in my atheism and my skepticism, while I was convinced that it was purely on intellectual grounds, there was definitely a heart decision to it as well, and I don’t think I was fully honest with myself at the time, but I was already determined not to believe, and the kind of intellectual questions that I had and I guess the arguments that I felt that I’d formulated and that I’d heard, particularly online from the New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, they were really just a means to substantiate the decision that I’d made to leave church and to give me good grounds for it and to feel that it was okay what I’d done and that I’d done the right thing and it was rational and reasonable and so on. But my wife carried on going to church and I did attend the occasional lunch with some friends from church who were very careful not to bring up the topic of faith, and in some ways it was frustrating, because I remember I was kind of thinking, “Just you wait. The first time that someone brings this up, then I can let them have it.” And tell them all the reasons why… “Don’t you realize these things that you haven’t thought of? You’re just blindly following this faith, and I’ve seen the light, and I’ve now decided to use my head and reason and logic and all those kind of faculties that I have to make a decision on this, and you’re just blindly following faith and carrying on.” And of course, it didn’t come up. They just shared meals, and that was it. It was nine years I was an atheist. But when I left church, I’d made the decision that I didn’t believe in God anymore, but I wanted to land somewhere. I wasn’t satisfied with saying what I didn’t believe. I certainly felt, “Well, what do I think, then? I don’t want to be a non-person. I don’t want to be somebody who just doesn’t believe. I do want there to be some kind of foundation for my life. What is that?” So I kind of did the usual thing that a lot of people do in this day and age that we live in. I used Google and looked on the Internet, and I came across some different organizations. Then I came across humanism. And of course I’ve heard of the term humanism but didn’t know much about it, and I thought, “Oh, humanist sounds good, because at least this is something where we’re saying, ‘Look, we’re all in it together. We’re human beings. Our morality and our reason and our purpose come from within. It comes from a shared human collective view of things.'” And so that seemed more attractive, and it seemed a bit more positive than the atheists, so I thought, “Ah, okay, humanist sounds good.” So I very strongly identified, certainly in those early years, as an atheist humanist. So I didn’t just backslide. I didn’t just kind of slip away or just stop going to church. There was no particular hurt, actually. When I left church, I did it 100 miles an hour. And actually I would say that I did go as far as saying, “I’m not just an atheist. I’m an atheist naturalist.” Okay. You’re probably aware that Richard Dawkins is famous for that quote. He said something like, “We are just dancing to the tune of our DNA and to the sound of the universe, and this universe is not personal. It’s just a cold universe and- Right. It’s a very sobered perspective. And at the time I appreciated that. I just thought, “This is honest atheism. This is where atheism should logically lead you to. It should lead you to naturalism because anything other than that is just a compromise. There can’t be anything other than just the natural. At the time I certainly felt, “At least he’s honest about his atheism,” that there is no hope. And there is no purpose. And that is how I felt. That’s a little bit interesting or a little bit ironic, even, for someone who, early on, was really searching for meaning, purpose, and looking at their future and desiring a worldview that actually provided substance towards that, as compared to the naturalist who, as you said, in Dawkins’ quote, “There is no real meaning or purpose. You’re just dancing to the music of your DNA,” right? Everything’s determined. There’s no free will. There’s no real purpose, no good and evil. If you are that honest atheist naturalist, did that not disturb you on any level? How did I feel? I guess I kind of satisfied myself that, “Well, if this is it, then this is it. And there were very intelligent people who believe this and accept it and yet still get on with their lives, so maybe the biggest challenge I’ve got is to find a way of continuing with life, carrying on with a purpose, as if there is a purpose,” even though philosophically, I was in a position where I didn’t feel that there was objective purpose or objective meaning. If we look at the world around us, we don’t look at people who are constantly, on a day-to-day basis, struggling with existential philosophical problems about who they are and what their meaning in life is. Not to say that people don’t think about these things. They do. But by and large, when you look at the world around you, you see people getting on with their lives, and I think I was kind of envious of those who’d never thought about God and never thought about theism or atheism before. They just ate and drank, had family time, and enjoyed life as much as they could. Yes, they had their struggles and tried to cope with them. And I kind of envied that, because I thought, “Well, the toothpaste is out of the tube now. I can’t go back to a position of just, ‘It doesn’t matter.'” Because I knew that it did matter, and I can’t just switch my mind off to it. So it was a bit of a struggle, but I think what I did was I just pushed certain things down beneath the surface and kind of wrapped myself up in this view that the most important thing for me is to be true to myself, which is true of anyone, to be honest about how I feel about things, and find a way to keep going with my marriage, find a way to keep living a fulfilling life and be the best dad that I can be, be the best husband I can be. I certainly didn’t want my marriage to suffer as a result or fail as a result, and so there’s something to work on, and keep going with my career. And find purpose in that, even if that is just an illusion, if you like, of the mind that says that there is a purpose, and it’s just something that’s just synaptic gaps firing away in your brain and that’s actually why you think that there is purpose and meaning to life. Even if that’s true, just kind of carry on regardless. It’s interesting you bring this up, because I think there was this transition from a very passionate, “I’ve stepped away from God, and I’m really affirming myself as a skeptic, atheist, humanist,” and I was very defensive about that. hearing someone like Christopher Hitchens, who was just so florid in his language, so fluid in the way that he could present his ideas, he was just really good to listen to, and I’d listen to Richard Dawkins. I met Richard Dawkins. I went to a book signing after a debate between Richard Dawkins and Professor Robert Winston, and I remember queueing up, and I got to the desk, and there’s Richard Dawkins in front of me, my hero. At the time. And I said to him, I used to be a Christian and I’m not anymore,” and I remember he just looked at me, and there was this awkward silence for about 5 seconds, and then I thought, “Well, I’ve got to say something,” so I said, “Oh, it’s Jim. Could you just put ‘to Jim’ and sign your name, please?” And he did that and handed me the book, and I walked away. He had no words. Nothing. No words at all. And it was just… it was bizarre. It was just a really strange encounter. Right! … got a convert away from Christianity to atheism. He just didn’t say a word. It was really odd. Awkward, yes. This is kind of that first phase of skepticism for me, where I’d wrap myself up in these warmly affirming, “You’re right to be an atheist. Here’s some really clever words and some clever arguments to keep you in that position, and whenever your wife gets home from church with the kids, you just remember that you just got the latest newsletter from the British Humanist Association through the post and read that,” and I would just do all these things. I wasn’t very adversarial or combative because, again, I knew that my wife was going to church still. I didn’t actually meet with humanists personally and join the group personally. I did all of this very much at a distance, just within myself. Probably because I felt that actually that might be too much. It might just cause there to be too much conflict. And then, of course, rather selfishly, I thought, “Well, if at all things go wrong, it’ll be me that gets the blame, you see?” So I was a bit selfish, I’m sorry to say. So a lot of this was kind of private thoughts and private readings. But then things changed a little bit, because again as we said before, I started to move into this stage of, “I just want to get on with life,” and, “I just want to move forward.” And so fast-forward a few years. I found myself becoming… It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t convinced by the arguments anymore, but my experience was that it felt like a lot of the humanist narrative that I was exposed to in social media, in the different literature that I’d received and so on, seems to be, “Whatever the church is saying, we’re opposed to it.” “Whatever religion says, we’re opposed to it,” and I kind of found myself becoming a bit tired of it. And particularly when there’s that kind of famous message that Richard Dawkins gave. He said, “We just shouldn’t debate people of faith. They’re not worthy of debate. We should mock them. We should ridicule them.” Oh, at the Reason Rally, I believe he said that. Yes. Yeah. And I just thought, “Hang on a minute. These friends of mine who I met at university who were Christians, they were intelligent people.” I knew of some who were far brighter than I was. Far more academic. And they were Christians. And I know friends and family who are Christians, and I thought, “I don’t feel that way towards them,” and I have to say, it’s absolutely right to say, not every atheist or skeptic feels that way, and we certainly shouldn’t assume that that is a typical view that they have. I know a lot of atheists have come out and said that they don’t think that Richard Dawkins was right to say that kind of thing. Because it’s not helpful. We don’t want to tar everybody with the same brush. But I think what happened during that time was I just softened. I think the defensiveness that I had had, the opposition to any attempt to engage had just softened, and I kind of found myself thinking, “Do you know what? I won’t renew my membership of the British Humanist Association.” I was only a member for a year, so I didn’t contribute much. And, “I’ll just kind of settle down a bit and not be so defensive,” I guess. And so life kind of carried on for a few years. But I joined a band, and I was doing well with work. I did creative things. And sort of carried on in that kind of vein. And then I hit this period where it was really funny. There was one friend. I can’t remember who it was, but I do remember the conversation, and I did share with people who’d never been Christians before that I was an ex-Christian, and I always found it really difficult to try and explain to them how important that was. From their experience, having not been a Christian, they just kind of saw it as, “Oh, right. Okay. So you don’t believe anymore. That’s all right, isn’t it?” They want to just get on with their lives. And I was like, “No! You don’t understand! This is a really huge thing. I’m not a Christian anymore, and don’t you realize that Christians think that this is really important and that your life depends on this decision and how important it is that we use our minds,” and all this kind of thing. But I remember having a conversation like that, and the response I got back was, “Well, you don’t know. One day you might come back to faith. You might change your mind,” and I said to them, “I can’t honestly see how that would be possible, given that now I’ve…” as far as I was concerned, I’d dismantled Christianity. I pulled back the curtain, like in the Wizard of Oz, and revealed what the real truth was, and that was how I saw it. So I saw a return to faith as really impossible because of where I’d arrived at. And yet it happened. And yet. So how did you make that turn? What happened that caused you to reconsider? A number of different things. I think first of all, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, and we were talking about our lives, and I just said, “You know what? I’ve got a great job. I’m really appreciative of my life. My job’s going well, and it’s fulfilling. Ish. I mean obviously there’s always something else that one would like to do differently perhaps. My family’s great. I live in a comfortable house. I can take the dog for a walk with a view over Swindon, and it’s lovely in the mornings. I’m in a band, playing bass in a band.” And I remember saying, “If I could go back to my 18-year-old self, I know that if I said this is what your life would end up, my 18-year-old self would say, ‘Hey, I’ve made it. I’ve done all right.'” And I remember having this conversation, and then a couple of days later, I was thinking about this, and I had probably a similar question to what I had right back when I was 19. I just went, “Yeah but so what? So what? What do I do next? What is the rest of my life going to be like? And where is meaning and purpose in life?” And that question came up again, the big kind of, “So what?” question. “What is the purpose of life?” And, “What meaning is there?” And, “Is it just manufactured? Is it just a way of kind of coping to get through your existence?” And I kind of had this little alarm bell, going, “Uh oh. Hang on in a minute. Let’s not go there. That’s going to lead me to God again,” so I kind of brushed that under the carpet. But then other things happened. I remember there was a time when I was sitting outside, on a bench outside my house one summer evening, and I was thinking about my career and my job. And again, I enjoyed it and I liked it, but I was also kind of thinking, “I feel that I want to do something different,” and I was kind of going through this little struggle. And this thought came to mind, that, “Hey, one day I would have prayed about this, but I don’t have that opportunity now. That’s not available to me anymore.” And there was a kind of sense of personal reflection, sort of an intellectual exercise. It was just simply asking, I guess, the beginnings of the question, “Why did I walk away? Why did I choose to actually abandon my faith, given that there are other believers who must have gone through similar things, who must have had similar struggles, and probably some who’ve gone through far worse situations than I’ve gone through, and yet have kept their faith?” And I thought of people like Corrie ten Boom and others like that, who I just thought their lives weren’t anywhere near as comfortable as mine is. I was so grateful for the life that I’ve got relative to others, and yet others have stayed the course. I think because I was already in a place where I’d softened a bit and I’d become less defensive and just more open generally, I kind of went through this period of reflection. And I remember lying in bed one night and thinking back through my life, and it was really strange actually. It’s an interesting time because I was kind of looking back at all the different years, every year of my life, from the age of 19, and all the different events that happened, and it was almost like my life was kind of being played out. And I just couldn’t sleep. And I kind of woke up the next morning with that question of, “Had I made the right decision? Was it all about the intellectual doubts or was there something else?” And so I thought, “I need to kind of address this again. What’s my biggest obstacle?” And I thought, “Okay, let’s look at science. Let’s see if there’s anyone who’s said something about this in response to the kind of New Atheist monologue that’s come out,” people like Dawkins and Hitchens and so on. And I don’t remember how I found it. I did a search on my Kindle to look for a good book to read, I just thought, “I want to read something that’s by somebody who’s at a university that is a reputable university and not a Christian institute.” So I kind of did this search. I came across this book. I think it’s called Gunning for God by a man called John Lennox, who is a professor of mathematics at Oxford University, and I thought, “Oh, Oxford. That’ll do.” I think the subtext to that was something like “why the New Atheists are missing the mark,” or something like that. And so I read that, and I started to read the writings and hear some of the counter arguments to those typical arguments that I’d seen from the New Atheists, talking about whether religion was the root of all evil, whether it was a poison, as Christopher Hitchens called it, whether Jesus really did rise from the dead and what the evidence of that is. And I also kind of read other books by John Lennox as well. In a short period of time, and I did all this secretly, without my wife knowing, because again I think just being that introverted thinker, I just thought, “Well, this is my little journey. I’ll just think about these things.” And then I think what challenged me was I was confronted with the realization that I’d probably put obstacles in the way of faith that weren’t really legitimate obstacles that were kind of false obstacles and barriers to continuing believing. The big thing for me was about evolution and what our origins are, and my view when I was a Christian was that, if you believed that the Bible is inerrant and is inspired, then you are committed to a six-day creation event and a 6,000-year-old earth, and if you can’t commit to that, then you’re not somebody who takes scripture seriously. And I found that when I read what John Lennox had to say on that, he just said, “Actually, that’s not the case,” that actually that view on the age of the earth and on the six days of creation has been debated for hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s not a new thing. And just kind of challenged my thinking on that. And so I started to unpick this view that reason and rationality and logic are tools that are exclusively for use by atheists and nontheists and skeptics and that faith is something that is purely a blind faith. And lots of other things as well. But I found John Lennox, the way he wrote and the way he expressed himself was really clear, really articulate, and also very fair. And I also listened to, or watched online, a couple of sermons by a friend of mine called Gavin who was at university that he gave at his church in Perth about the kingdom and the convent. And it was almost like just being reintroduced to the Gospel again, but hearing the Gospel in the context of the entire Old Testament and New Testament, and I went for a walk with the dog to a little parkland that overlooks Swindon. And I remember I sat down, and I was thinking about all this, and I just thought, “Do you know what? I could investigate everything and keep investigating and then look at the counter claim or counter argument and then look at the counter counter argument and keep going. How much knowledge do I have to amass before I can be satisfied on this question of whether God exists or not and whether he wants to relate to me or not?” And I realized that, if I’m not careful, my project that I’d embarked on would just be this never-ending constant series of questions. And it’s good to question. I’m not saying at all that that shouldn’t happen. It’s absolutely right that we ask questions. But at some point we have to get to a stage where we stop and make a decision. And so I found myself saying the first prayer of nine years, which was, “Okay, God. If You’re there and You’re real, I’m prepared to think about You again,” and that was as far as I was prepared to go. You know, it wasn’t really a prayer. It was more just kind of a statement, and then I walked away and kind of went home. And it was actually just a couple of weeks later that I found myself in the same spot, and I just thought, “Do you know what? It all starts to make sense,” and I don’t know if you recall. There were these pictures that were really popular about twenty years. I think they were computer images. They used to call them Magic Eye, and you’d get a book of them. And they just looked like these really complex patterns, but if you were to kind of look at them carefully, you should see a 3D kind of image by staring at them. Yes. And I can only liken it to this, that what I realized that I needed to do was not focus on the individual patterns, not focus on every single individual question, but to kind of just step back, take time, reflect, and look at the big picture. And when I did that, it just felt to me like there was a coherent message behind all of these questions that I had and all of the answers that I felt were there. What I mean by that is that the thing that made most sense of what I observed in the world around me and what my experience of life was, the thing that made the most sense about that, was that there was a God, that He does exist, that we are created beings, that we are immaterial minds and not just physical brains, that the universe hasn’t existed for eternity and didn’t just pop into existence by magic but had a beginning, and that there is a meaning to life that has been given to us externally by a God who has given life meaning in the first place and given us meaning. And so I then found myself thinking about Psalm 139, which came to mind. I think there’s a part where it says, “You perceive my thoughts from afar,” and I was just reflecting on how that Psalm talks about God knowing our minds and knowing our thoughts, and I thought, “God knows the questions that I’ve got, and He understands them. He knows why I made the decisions that I made,” in that process of reflection, I just prayed the prayer and just said, “God, I’m yours again. I’m back,” and recommitted my life to Him. Wow! That’s an amazing story. And you speak of the process, the journey in such eloquent terms, and I’m very struck by your self-awareness of the different aspects of your journey, whether it be intellectual or existential, your awareness of your openness or resistance. Perhaps the way that you describe yourself as an intellectual—or an introverted thinker, I think you said. You are very thoughtful, and we are the grateful recipients of that thought process, because you’ve made it so clear. Some of your story reminds me a little bit of the way Esther Meek describes what she calls knowing God in her book, called Longing to Know. She describes that same thing as the 3D picture. It is there to see, but you have to have the intention and the willingness to reflect to see it. So in the same way in which you sat back, you thought, you studied, you listened, you reflected, and then the picture came into being. It made sense. You were able to see all of these things coming together, like you say, the world around you and the experience of your own life, that the Christian worldview is, like you say, coherent. It’s comprehensive. It seems to connect with what we experience in reality. What a beautiful story you have! I do have a question, a couple of things with regard to your wife. One is that you resisted the mocking, the ridicule of the Christian, and I wonder if some of that had to do with the fact that you knew Christians personally easy to have an us/them mentality. It’s easy to dehumanize or degrade the other, but when you’re actually married to someone who calls themself a Christian, when you have friends, like you say, that are intellectual, that are loving, that actually belong to you, I think that that’s not an easy determination, in terms of, “I’ll just ridicule and mock and dismiss.” You can’t just do that because you experientially know differently. And so I wondered if you could speak to that. And I also wondered, with regard to your wife, because I know that people listening have a spouse or someone they love who does not believe, who sees things quite differently, I wondered how your wife’s response to your disbelief affected, not only your perspective about Christianity but your willingness to come back to it. Yeah. It wasn’t easy. I think when it first became clear that I was having doubts about my Christian faith and particularly through the period where I made clear my intentions to leave church and not believe anymore, I think the initial response from my wife was… She was shocked, and she was concerned. And rightly so, because faith is really important, and we met as believers, and we had shared a common love for God and each other. We’d got married under covenant before God. And so all these things were important. And I wasn’t naive to the impact that this would have on Liz, and so it was absolutely right that she responded initially with that shock and that concern, and you know, “What does this mean for us? What does this mean for our marriage?” And I tried to assure her that, “Look, we’ll find a way to carry on, and we’ll just have to kind of get through things. I think probably the biggest challenge for Liz and the thing that she struggled with most was just kind of knowing how to respond around me. Knowing how to not push too hard. She certainly didn’t want to stop going to church herself, and she didn’t want to stop taking the children to church, and we agreed fairly early on. I think actually she was quite firm on that. She said, “This is your journey, but I don’t want this to result in the kids not going to church,” and I said, “That’s fine.” And I think probably, if I’m honest, I said, “That’s fine,” and then behind the scenes, whispered, “Don’t worry. I’ll get them somehow. They will hear what I have to say on this by some other gratuitous route.” So I think that was the initial response to that, and it was difficult. We had to kind of work things out. And there were difficult conversations. There were awkward moments. I think I probably said some things that were just a bit insensitive, really, that was just me blurting out kind of different, new feelings and thoughts that I’d had about the Christian faith. So we had to wrestle with that and work it out, but I think, underneath that, what mattered was… She was definitely determined to keep her marriage intact, and so was I, and I had no doubt that Liz wanted me to believe again, of course, and that the people in the church would want me to believe again, but after a couple of years, things just kind of settled down. I think from Liz’s point of view, I know she was praying for me, and I know that she prayed, “Lord, may it only go so far and no more,” because part of the—and I guess this is something that perhaps Christians do wrestle with, is, if you don’t have an objective morality, then where’s that going to lead you? Where does the buck stop? Where do you get your boundaries from? And thankfully I was really keen to make sure that there could be no accusations made against me that I’d suddenly gone from this life of being a Christian to a life of doing all the wrong kind of things and a life of depravity and so on, so I was really keen to make sure that, just because I don’t believe anymore doesn’t mean I’m going to go away and get drunk every night and do drugs or whatever. I still feel that there are boundaries in life, and I want to honor those. And I think, once we’d kind of had that period of time where we both got that assurance that our marriage could keep going and that we could still relate to each other, albeit with this change in belief that I’d had, we just kind of got settled into normal life. But I think—it has to be said. I know Liz would say to someone who has a spouse who doesn’t believe, is to be gentle, to not push too hard, and to keep praying. I remember Liz actually—this is the year leading me up to me coming back to faith, Liz invited me. She’d gone to a new church by this stage that I wasn’t familiar with, and she said, “Oh, we’re having a picnic on a Sunday afternoon. Would you like to come? You don’t have to. It’d just be really nice if you could be there because it’s a nice sunny day.” And I said yes. And I said yes because I was not in that stage of being really defensive, so I thought, “Okay, why not?” And it was just a picnic. There was another Sunday afternoon where there was a barbecue at someone’s house, and I came along, and if I heard a conversation where people got onto the God stuff, I’d walk away and mingle somewhere else, but I remember having a conversation with somebody about music for quite a long time, and it was a really lovely conversation. And so I think that epitomizes where I was at. I’m prepared to just meet with people. And that really helped, I think. Just being able to connect with people. And I think that helped Liz as well, to kind of see that I was willing to do that. So yeah. I think that’ll be very helpful. Jim, as we’re winding up here, can you speak to the curious skeptic who might be reflecting a bit, perhaps? Or curious. Just about their own beliefs. Perhaps thinking about the meaning and purpose in their own life or wherever it is they are or perhaps thinking that there is no intellectual substance to Christianity. There’s a lot of things that you can speak to. What would you tell someone like that, who might be listening? The one thing that I do feel passionately about is this view that reason and rationality and logic are devices that are solely for the use of atheists and skeptics and nontheists, and that belief in the God of Christianity, is a belief that you can reach that is completely consistent with your ability to reason and to think. I think the idea that reason and rationality is not available to the Christian, or that the Christian faith and belief in God cannot be supported rationally, I think that’s the one thing that I would say I really would like to challenge people on. There are people of all backgrounds, people of all levels of education, from Nobel prize winning physicists to sports personalities to former terrorists, in every different country, all forms of culture, all different types of culture, throughout history, in different times in the timeline of human history, who have found a reason to believe. And I think, for me, the encouragement that I would give is to make a distinction between teasing apart the arguments and trying to understand difficulties and finding answers to these questions and try and see that as something that is important, but it’s not the whole picture. There’s a really interesting introduction in a book called Basic Christianity by John Stott, and he talks about how a young man in his congregation was having questions and met with him and said, “You know, I just don’t think I believe anymore. I’m going to be leaving church,” and John Stott said to him, “If I was to answer all of your questions to your intellectual satisfaction, would you change the way you lived?” And the look on the young man’s face said that he wouldn’t. And so it kind of begs the question, so is it just about intellectual thinking or is it something else? John Stott said that this man’s problem wasn’t intellectual. It was moral. if it’s with your heart that you believed, is it not also the case it’s with your heart that you don’t believe? And I think that’s the thing that I would put out there. Take yourself away from all of the noise of the debates for a moment. Go and sit on a hillside. Go and take yourself away to a quiet place. And give yourself that room to examine yourself and to think about, “What is that point that I would get to where I say, ‘Okay, I’ve answered enough. I’ve searched enough. I’ve discovered enough. And now is a time to make a decision.'” Because if you do that and you find that actually the answer is, “Well, there never will be,” then you have to ask yourself the question, “Is it really an intellectual reason why I don’t believe in God? Is that really the barrier that’s preventing me from making that decision?” I think that’s really excellent. Very challenging. Like you say, challenging and encouraging, I think, for all of us, in terms of why we believe, what we believe, and what we tell ourselves about why we believe what we believe. Sometimes those can be two very different things. Yeah. If you were to speak to the Christian who really has a heart for those who don’t see Christianity as true or good or real, what would you say to them? I would say don’t put up artificial barriers to someone coming to meet and be a disciple of Christ. the advice would be be gentle, be respectful, always give a reason for the hope that we have but do it with gentleness and respect, and all of those things. And that’s probably the advice a lot of people would give. But I think my biggest thing would be that, if we make coming to God really difficult for people, we shouldn’t be surprised when people find it really hard to come to faith, and again, as I mentioned earlier, if we insist that the only interpretation of Genesis, for example, is a six-day creation and the 6,000-year-old earth—and I’m not getting into that debate—I’m just saying that if we make that a condition, or any other doctrinal point a condition, other than the core doctrines of the Christian faith, if we make that a condition of belief, then we’re just making it really, really hard for people to see the invitation of God. And so I’d say just reflect on that. And pray for people. A lot of people were praying for me all the way through, but I mentioned that I spent a year in Kenya after university, and I spent a year there with a chap called Philip, who was from a similar place in London where I lived, and we got to know each other throughout that year and became really good friends. He went on to do mission work in Tanzania, and after I had left faith, I had just lost touch with him, so I’d not spoken to him for about 10 years at the point that I came back to faith. I didn’t know that he knew that I’d fallen away. So I kind of reconnected with him on Facebook, got his email address, and I sent him an email and I told him my story. And I said, “I hope you’re sitting down, but nine years ago, I abandoned my faith and became an atheist, but recently I came back to faith.” And he was studying in the US. He got his doctorate in New Testament Studies, and he was supervised by someone called Craig Keener. I don’t know if you know of him. Yes. Oh, yes. And so Philip was studying for his PhD, and he’s a really great guy, very faithful, very British. He described himself as so British that even British people think he’s British. And not one to exaggerated, but he emailed me back, and he said, “Jim, I was really thrilled to hear from you. By the way, I actually knew that you’d fallen away because word had got around the grapevine, and I was really shocked back then, especially given your experience of being a Christian and all the reasons why you were a Christian, and I prayed for you, but over the years, apathy set in and I forgot and time moved on.” And then he said, “Until recently, a few months ago, you were in a dream, and after I had this dream, and it wasn’t a very specific dream, but you were in it, and I woke up with a strong sense to pray for you every day, which I did, at least every day, if not every week, from that time on,” and he said, “So I was thrilled when you reached out to me soon after and even more thrilled to find out that you’d actually come back to faith when I was hoping that you would just be reconsidering God again.” And this just knocked me for six, because I just thought that moment that he’d had that dream, the moment that he’d had that conviction to pray for me, thousands of miles away, with ten years of silence, that very moment that he decided to pray for me was the moment that I started to consider God again. And so the message is just don’t forget that this isn’t just a physical kind of thing that’s happening here. This is spiritual, and prayer is important. Keep praying for people. And don’t give up hope. Again, that’s not to suggest that it was only Philip’s prayer of course. Because I know a lot of people were praying for me, and I really appreciate that, but I just found it remarkable that I really felt that prompting to pray at that time was specifically the right thing for that time as I was going through that journey of rediscovering God. That’s extraordinary! And it is truly a word for all of us, how, I think as you spoke of earlier in your story, there’s a sense in which Christianity can become too ordinary for us as Christians, and it can become less and lesser and less related to our daily lives. But you are a vivid reminder that that—it’s really not a good thing for many different reasons. First of all, just the fact that those who really appreciate that the Christian life is extraordinary and it is supernatural and that there is a God who oversees and superintends and engages in, as you said at the very beginning, in your journeying to God for the first time, He’s a Person. A Person who we can know. A Person who knows us and loves us infinitely. And so much so that He listens to the prayers of His people and that lives are changed. What a beautiful portrait that you have painted of your life, both towards God, away from God, and then even more robustly toward this beautiful and full relationship with God that is not only intellectual but existential and makes sense of your life and makes sense of all of reality, even. So thank you for spending the time. I think it was well worth spending this time to hear your entire story. So thank you, Jim, so much for coming on board. You’re welcome. It was a pleasure to speak with you, and just thanks for the opportunity to share my story. You’re so welcome, Jim. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jim’s story. You can find out more about the resources he mentioned in the episode notes listed on the podcast page. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at the thesidebpodcast@cslewisinstitute.org. If you enjoyed it, subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.  

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